


Instead of Stars

by rednightmare



Series: Subsistence Dreaming [2]
Category: Half-Life
Genre: Body Horror, Character Death, Character Study, Dehumanization, Depression, Found Family, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Guns, Gunshot Wounds, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Infertility, Medical Trauma, Memory Loss, Needles, Platonic Love, Police Brutality, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Shooting, Stabbing, Substance Abuse, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2020-10-22
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:53:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 36,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27143431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rednightmare/pseuds/rednightmare
Summary: There are no stars left. Maybe you should have let him sleep.Barney Calhoun character study set during the events ofHalf-Life 2, and the last days of his life as a Metrocop. A sort of follow-up toBLACK COFFEE.
Relationships: Barney Calhoun & Alyx Vance, Barney Calhoun & Gordon Freeman, Barney Calhoun & Original Character(s)
Series: Subsistence Dreaming [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1981333
Comments: 23
Kudos: 40





	Instead of Stars

**Author's Note:**

> Who arbitrarily serializes a decade-old one-shot? ME AFTER BINGING AN HLA LET’S PLAY, THAT’S WHO.
> 
> Just a few notes:
> 
> 1.This piece is in a contiguous canon with my ancient Mesa-era fic, [BLACK COFFEE](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18530098). INSTEAD OF STARS can be read free-standing, though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that; they share a bunch of themes and the second leans heavily on a structure convention from the first. If you’re just not keen on (re)visiting BLACK COFFEE, you can squeeze by knowing the biggest structural conceit of that fic was the use of second-person POV to indicate trauma state. And that Barney’s troubled home life caused him to imagine Gordon as something of the big brother he wished he had.
> 
> 2\. The canon HL2 timeline has been slightly slowed down and minor mission details have been tweaked for a less-frenetic and more cohesive written narrative.
> 
> 3\. While this isn’t a shippy fic, there is a single line of non-explicit sex in the penultimate section. If you want to skip this, just stop reading at “You’ll find out soon” and resume reading in the next paragraph.
> 
> 4\. This story digs its fingers deep into police state fascism. I have a strong personal aversion to splatterpunk and dystopia porn, and have endeavored to handle the political themes sensitively—but not shyly. Please mind the tags.
> 
> 5\. [ashas-arts](https://ashas-arts.tumblr.com) drew this [incredible illustration](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/770504380688236575/770504454113198110/image0.png?width=598&height=527) that cracked my heart in the best way. Do yourself a favor and go check out her art blog, especially if you like Half-Life (of course you do) and/or Disco Elysium!

╔═══════════════════════╗

_The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their grueling travels across trackless lands in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space._

—WILBUR WRIGHT

╚═══════════════════════╝

For the first time in twenty-two years, you dream.

In your dream, there is a train. It is not like the kind you remember from when you were a kid—not spit-shine black and clackity-clack with a teapot whistle and a smokestack on top. You’re not sure those old trains exist anymore. You’d like to think they do. You’d like to think there’s a rusty steam locomotive locked up in a Civil Protection garage somewhere, one with big hokey wagon wheels that go _chugga-chugga_. One whose sounds might make a redneck boy dream desperately of all the better places in the world he would go—someday, maybe, when he was big enough to pull his bootstraps out of the sandhills and escape. Someday when things were different. Someday, God, when he was older.

But you’re older, aren’t you.

You’re mighty different, and so are things. Those _someday, maybe_ trains haven’t come around here for a long time, and there are no baby boys left to dream about them—not in the backwoods or the dunes or the ass-end of Nebraska. There are no babies. And no one wants to go anywhere on one of your trains.

But that’s not what happens in your dream.

This train in your dream looks like trains do now. It is a dark spade with a terrible steel face and its eyes are colorless. It screams, monstrous and knifelike, out of its long tunnel and into City Seventeen and into your all-seeing eye.

It hulks to a stop on Platform 6-3. There is no whistle and there is no smoke. It is just there. The black cars _plink-plink_ gently as they cool in this fine morning, and though they don’t smoke, steam rises from the hot electric rails. It’s raining in your dream. It’s Lunar Cycle Nine, and even now—after everything—the clouds still blush like marigolds when it sun-showers, and the brown poplar leaves crinkle across the sidewalk, and the air feels a little bit warm. You’re looking forward to riding your motorbike home after your shift. You still call it September in your head.

Outside your head, you call it Lunar Cycle Nine.

That’s oak. You’ve got a secret name, too.

The readout on your monitor says:

**DAY 9 LUNAR 9 REVOLUTION 2023  
зона техники ELECTRIC RAIL STATION PROSPEKT  
C16 – C17 INBOUND – COMMUTER LINE  
NO. E12-A013-Z00963B  
DUE 1000 d9.l9.r2023  
ARRIVAL 1003 d9.l9.r2023**

You watch trains now. That is your life.

You don’t set foot on these trains, of course. You don’t ride them to Sector G; you don’t bang on shuttle doors when you run late; you don’t spill your coffee down your blue button-up shirt. Your shirt is black now. Your gloves are black. Your boots are black. Your trains are black. Your hair is black, mostly. There is a black taste in your mouth all the time. You sit in your chair in your elevated OPTICON—no one calls it an office—and you watch the screens and you count the people who come and go. You know they never come back. 

Most of the time, you wear the white mask. Most of the time, you have colorless eyes, too.

You manually pilot a CS-C1 CITY SCANNER CLASS ONE drone toward the train for a better look. The panel over the cowcatcher grill is bright red and it says:

**NC-RAZOR-C2**

A razor—that’s what they call trains now. They cut things up. The ones in your life, and the one in your dream.

This train you dream—it’s not quite on-time. That happens every so often; an OVERWATCH sting squad will hit a run between stations and yank a bunch of cargo, human or otherwise, then ghost. They usually neglect to update all you NC NON-COMBINE cityboys at CP, but their frisks never take more than a few minutes. You replay the arrival on your monitor. The train in your dream screeched up at exactly _one-zero-zero-three_ —because nobody says _ten-oh-three-ay-em_ anymore—and it’s a whole three seconds off, so you pull up its serial number.

Your dream is thorough, if nothing else. You close your eyes and you see numbers. You open your eyes and you see trains.

This is your problem now. You have to address it. You have got to respond.

 _“Platform 6-3,”_ you say in your dream, into your mouthpiece. The vocoder fries it into something black and mechanical like the rest of you, but you don’t mind. It sort of helps. You say: “ _Come in Platform 6-3. This is MP six-one sixty-six twenty thirty-seven eighteen Pavelko in the OPTICON. I’m seeing an inconsistency on Rail B. We’re off-schedule, less than a minute. Requesting cargo manifest. MP Bently, check it out.”_

 _“Ten-four, MP Pavelko.”_ You sound exactly the same, like a robot with its voicebox halfway underwater. “ _This is MP twenty-nine oh-eight nineteen eleven oh-two Bently. MP is en route.”_

This is the voice you hear now. Day in, day out.

MP 2908.19.1102 Bently slides her checkpoint cubicle door halfway open, activates her stun baton, and shimmies through. You can’t see her badge on your screen, and you’ve never seen her face behind the white mask, but you can tell it’s her by that pissy little heel-toe walk she does. She’s always here with you—MP 2908.19.1102 Bently and MP 6166.20.3718 Pavelko, Shift MP3C GOLD. You’re not entirely sure she’s a she, but that kind of thing doesn’t matter anymore. It never did matter, maybe, but it’s a shame to find out this way.

You don’t bother imagining how she imagines you.

She traverses the concrete catwalk toward the train. Heel-toe, heel-toe. The mist makes her boots shine. You watch her move and wonder if you have a little walk, too.

In your dream, you call the train. You don’t speak with anyone. The machine voice that comes out of your mouth says:

**“LINE FIVE SEVEN OH-TWO CITY SIXTEEN-TO-CITY SEVENTEEN INBOUND. THIS IS STATION PROSPEKT. YOUR TRAIN HAS BEEN RANDOMLY SELECTED FOR ADDITIONAL SCREENING. METROPOLICE ARE CURRENTLY BOARDING. ALL CITIZENS, REMAIN SEATED AND PREPARE YOUR RELOCATION COUPON FOR THE CIVIL PROTECTION OFFICER.”**

You do not say good morning. You do not say thank you. You do not say _stay calm_.

The train in your dream does stay calm, though. It sits still under the camera flash. The conductor blinks the headlights to affirm.

As MP Bently walks through those high-beams, momentarily lighting up her mask like a silver matchhead, she pats a thigh. She thumbs the safety off her pistol. Your shift got a lackluster performance eval last week—suboptimal emigration processing times. She’s not fucking around today. Even in your dream, you hope to hell there’s nobody on that train who shouldn’t be.

You wish MP 2908.19.1102 Bently wasn’t part of your dream. You hate her guts in a real honest and unfussy way, and it seems unfair to let slugheads occupy your sleeping hours, too. But who else you got to dream about?

The train in your dream doesn’t resist. It transmits a manifest to the OPTICON. You glance it over as fast as you can, landscaping words more than reading them, hunting for discrepancies that seem a little too innocuous to be random, scouring for any configuration of black letters that hit the back of your brain and don’t feel right.

That’s why you’re here. That’s why you work trains.

In this dream, you don’t find anything that looks like Resistance activity. You usually don’t. So you forward the list to Bently as-is, no intervention. Your finger eases off the key carefully, carefully. You feel your heart pinch.

You hope you didn’t just fuck a rebel over. That happens sometimes, too.

On your screen—in your dream—you watch as Bently receives the file. She stands there casually on the platform, flips out her handheld, curls a metal knuckle, and taps the readout thrice. Damn thing must be on the fritz. Your heart pinches a little bit less.

 _“OPTICON here. Manifest logged,”_ you tell her. Or maybe she tells you. You’re not sure how you’d know—not in a dream. _“MP Bently, you are clear to enter. Get them doggies rollin’.”_

She scoffs at you. You hear her in the white mask, but it just sounds like your voice popping back.

You were being a little dramatic before. You do, in fact, do hear one other voice on STATION PROSPEKT—one that isn’t mechanically garbled to sound like all the rest. It’s the one that plays over-and-over, endlessly. The one you almost remember from another time, full of honey and cowardice, that sounds like it’s trying to be everybody’s therapist and the school principal at once. The one that used to make you bite and grind your tongue all day at your CP station until it bled secretly inside your mouth. The one that says _welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome._

MP Bently’s at the first car now. Nobody drives these trains, but she thumps the sealed compartment to warn the conductor. The baton at her hip dons an orb of spiteful blue in the fog. But the rain is already clearing; the clouds freckle apart; it won’t be long until the sun dries the puddles, and then it will be September again. Her fist pounds in tandem with the fatherly voice. The administrator says _welcome welcome welcome welcome_.

 _Welcome_ , he says in your dream, too. _Welcome to City Seventeen._

The train hisses open.

* * *

It’s not the only dream you have.

In your other dream, you are stuck six thousand miles over earth, twinkling in cold space. There is golden desert below you. Somewhere in there, among the basins and the mountains and the Lambda Corp. tram tunnels, is Wallace Breen’s voice.

He says:

_Allow me, my fellow men of science, to say a few words on Innovation._

_The human race is the only cognizant inventor-species in the known universe. This truth has occasionally been tested by false contenders—by the finch with its drill, by the octopus with its shield, by the chimpanzee with its crude stone hammer._

_Theirs, however, is utility without deliberation. Theirs is use without artistry. Theirs is chance without the spark of inspiration. And it is this thin but unbreakable line in the sand that remains the essential difference between Instinct and Innovation. Perhaps it is not incorrect to suggest that Innovation_ is _our Instinct—our most fundamental means of interacting with the world, of testing our limits, of ensuring our survival._

_Every one of you here tonight—every member of our Black Mesa research family—joins us thanks to the merits of his or her personal genius. But your work ripples far beyond the personal. As you pave the path toward the future of our singularly gifted species, intrepid and beloved Innovators, never forget the history of your calling. Remember, always, that modern Man does not enjoy the sky as his domicile by birthright. We soar because, despite the limitations of apparent reality, a twentieth-century inventor—Orville Wright—one day woke up, looked at the clouds, and dared to ask, "If birds can fly, then why can't I?”_

You dream of Dr. Freeman’s glasses in a cold white hallway, smiling at you without smiling, turning away towards a distant black door.

You dream the sky groans around you. You dream the stars quake. You dream the elevator gives.

You dream that you fall until you wake up in bed, human again.

* * *

The Wallace Breen on all the screens does not fuck around with inspiration anymore. He smiles in his black turtleneck and looks right into everyone’s eyes and he says:

_Good afternoon, my beloved City Seventeen. It is day nine of lunar cycle nine in revolution twenty twenty-three, and I trust you are having a productive day under the watchful eye of Our Benefactors._

The readout on your monitor says:

**DAY 9 LUNAR 9 REVOLUTION 2023  
зона техники ELECTRIC RAIL STATION PROSPEKT OPTICON  
NEW MANIFEST ENTRY LOGGED**

**RECORDING OFFICER SERIAL  
MP 6166.20.3718-C17**

You were never really a math guy. But in the new world, you’ve got nothing against math. What you hate is numbers.

Too many numbers make you sick. You detest the dash-twos, dash-threes, class-ones. You spit fire when you see too many decimal points, too many big honking Civil Protection abbreviations, too many NC-C2 NON-COMBINE CLASS codes. The serialization of things is your enemy. You see incomprehensible mathematics in your dreams.

In your dream, the numbered train stands there, waiting. It blinks its red devil eye on, off.

You’d think, after all these years, you would dream of something else—that you’d have bloodier nightmares; that you’d long for Mexican canyons; that you’d close your eyes and feel your fingers dragging through brittle corn leaves in bumfuck-nowhere, USA. You’d think it’d be anything besides these goddamned ugly Combine trains. But you don’t, and it isn’t. You stand all day at your desk and tally them. At night, you lie on the cool bed in your dark officer’s apartment. The ceiling is black. The sky is black, too. Radiation black with the Citadel at the middle, filling the air with noise. The city lights are too bright now for a moon or for stars.

You close your eyes and open them. The screens show you everything left in the world.

Doctor Breen is on the STATION PROSPEKT television above you every day and every day he says: _Welcome to City—you have been—to parts unknown._

_You have chosen or been chosen.  
You are passing through.  
You are safer.  
You are here._

In your dream, you’re antsy as hell. All of a sudden, and the nervous itching breaks out over your shoulders, behind your knees, under the shadow of hair on your throat. You can’t get at it right now, so you stand up and check the other monitors. You scratch and scratch at the pressure release button under your chin. You list your own serial numbers. You don’t think of any faces you love. _Six-one sixty-six twenty—_

Bently interrupts you. Saves you—a little.

_“OPTICON, this is MP Bently reporting back from RAZOR ee-twelve ay-zero thirteen zee doublezero ninety-six threebee. I’ve got noncompliant in Car Five. Requesting civilian processing team.”_

Last month, Bently caught you waltzing out of a medical outpost with a big old industrial bottle of insulin for Doctor K stuffed in your drawers. You lied it off—claimed it was for a detainee—but she got the insulin, and she got your serial. And you decided you’d better give her everything else she wants for a while, too.

 _“Ten-four, MP Bently.” Ten-four_ hits the roof of your mouth a little too sharply, but your vocoder hides it. _“This is OPTICON. Metrocop en route.”_

That funny feeling is still twisting up your guts. You stand, sweating in your white mask and your black gloves. You feel like you’re going to belch up a blood bubble. Maybe you have an ulcer. You’ll have to ask if Doctor K has any antacids left.

You’d better Metrocop yourself down there.

Technically, you’re not supposed to leave the OPTICON. Them’s the rules—but rules are bent all the time on the railway; you’re understaffed; even OVERWATCH can’t stop the humanity of a workplace fuckup here-n’-there. You make sure to log yourself into the system as _officer in transit_ before dipping out.

Your profile pops up on the monitor at the touch of your hand heel. The subdermal microchip tingles, reminding you that OVERWATCH already knows exactly where you are.

**PAVELKO, JOEL J.  
MP 6166.20.3718-C17  
ASSIGNMENT: STATION PROSPEKT  
DETAIL: ELECTRIC RAIL OVERSEER  
SHIFT CODE: MP3C GOLD  
CIVIL PROTECTION PRIVILEGE-POINT SCORE: 0317**

That’s you, all right. You swipe it away.

Our Benefactors like to keep track of Civil Protection. Ya’ll’ve got just a few too many guns for an NC NON-COMBINE outfit, and it makes the slugheads nervous. If you don’t let OVERWATCH root a wire in your brain, letting them chip you is the next-best thing.

The meat still hurts around the CP chip sometimes. That’ll happen when you keep yanking it out and sticking it back in. Kleiner used to scurry out of the lab to do it for you with a pair of forceps and an iodine dropper, but having the old man outside is an unnecessary risk, and you’ve gotten real good at pasting your edges back together now. You can get that sucker in and out within about thirty-five seconds if you’re pressed. Palm face-up; slip a straight razor edge or a pencil sharpener blade or a sharp bobby pin into the baby scar; lift the muscle, wiggle a centimeter of black chip out, bite it between your teeth; pull like you’re taking the stem off a cherry. You usually jam it into a potato or something and toss it into bed where your fist would otherwise rest, just in case the hardware can sense when it’s lying abnormally flat. Reinserting it without suspiciously fucking up your skin is a little less convenient. There’s never enough time for the wound to heal, so you use glue—it’s subtle—it’s just a tidy dark red line, more tender than it should be when you curl your fingerpads into it and squeeze.

But it doesn’t bother you in your dream.

In your dream, you enter a noncompliant into the system, just real quick before you jog downstairs. You have memorized the code for CITIZEN ARREST. You hit APPLY.

Your PriP ticker goes up. Ten points. It flashes inside your mask.

**PRIVILEGE-POINT RECORDED  
NEW SCORE: 0327  
THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE**

Your score’s low this quarter. Not low enough to be dangerous, but low enough that shitheels like MP Bently shoot you the kind of eyes you can feel, even through the white mask. You’d better step up your porker game to five-hundred even. Nobody likes a sympathizer pig. Nobody likes to be reminded they’re a monster now.

Oh, man, you’d better not have a freaking ulcer. Nobody’s doing surgery on a guy with 327 PriP.

**CIVIL PROTECTION PRIVILEGE-POINT COUNTER**

**CITIZEN CORRECTIVE DISCIPLINE – 1 POINT  
CITIZEN DISPERSAL – 5 POINTS  
CITIZEN ARREST – 10 POINTS  
CITIZEN ARREST LEADING TO ANTICITIZEN CONVICTION – 30 POINTS  
ANTICITIZEN ARREST – 40 POINTS  
ANTICITIZEN NEUTRALIZATION ACTION – 40-500 POINTS**

It’s been sixty-two seconds. No sign of MP Bently. You had better skip-hop.

The OPTICON door sticks for a second. You bash it with your elbow a little harder than you mean to. It stutters open. You step out of the room of screens and descend the tight brick metro stairwell, overwhelmed by the stench of whitewash, holding your breath and closing your eyes because tight hallways make you feel like puking; you can’t stand the right-angle squeeze. Then you walk under the automatic turret and onto the station floor, where a handful of civilians wait at empty cafeteria tables and CS-C1 drones hover overhead like low-hanging plums. You are on the screens now, too.

MPs try not to chew fat front of civvies; it’s too humanizing. None of the other cops bother to so much as _hey-howya-doin_ you as you pass the checkpoint. That’s swell; you don’t much care to humanize them, either.

And you’re not the only one who watches trains.

The black-haired woman’s on the Platform 6-3 fence again. She clings to the chain-link, searching the faces of incoming passengers. And she’s been hovering like that for six shifts straight—counting the NC-RAZOR trains, looking for somebody. Doesn’t even turn her head when Metrocops walk through, like if she glances away for a single second, she’ll miss whatever it is she is waiting for.

She’s just the back of a dark ponytail under white lights most of the time. But she’s in your dream, too, because why the hell not. She’s here every single day. She might as well hang on the barricade of your sleep.

You bark at her:

**“GET OFF THE GATE.”**

You lunge from the rail-side of the barricade and slam your black fist into the metal weave right above her fingers, jangling the whole fence like a big old junkyard dog. The colorless eyes in your mask record the way she jumps back, yanking her hands free, and the facial recognition software check-plusses the expression of fear.

Your PriP score lifts by one.

Outside of your dream, you were a dick to her yesterday. You hoped she’d get the hint and scram before one of these bootlickers hauls her off to a drab room with a single drain. You snatched her off the fence by her backpack, busted its strap, plunged your fingers through the zipper, and shook it fecklessly all over the marble floor. But she didn’t budge—just kneeled and started sheepishly collecting her toothbrush and underwear and balled-up foil gum wrappers, babbling about an OVERWATCH delay and her husband being assigned to the next train. She kept saying his name and ID number over-and-over. SHANNON BLUM, she said, until it burned across your mind, and now you can’t shake it out. You look for SHANNON BLUM as you rapid-fire scan your passenger lists, even though you ought to save that synapse for more important people, for the Resistance, for the Cause. It pisses you off, to be honest. She doesn’t seem to understand he’s not coming.

You should have kicked her right then and there. Put your kneecap into her a few times, break a rib and scare the hell out of her so she doesn’t come back. But you looked at her down there, scraping up her little packages of oyster crackers, and fuck all, you didn’t have the heart.

And so today, she’s still here. She’s still clinging on that damned fence, holding her broken backpack in her arms now. Watching trains. Like you do.

Sometimes you wonder if anyone’s coming for either of you.

It’s stopped drizzling. The clouds are tearing apart overhead, showing the guts of a yellow sky, and the corrugated tin roof over Platform 6-3 drips. A mean crow chases some seagulls off it and you catch a glimpse of wing shadows. The damp concrete smells a certain way that makes you think of Lab East—of Dr. Uriah whipping your two-eyed ass at a game of Maintenance Yard Basketball, of gassing up the airboat and puttering out on Kanal rounds with Alyx when she was just a kid, of her making fishy-face and chasing you with a big oily carp on a line—and for a threatening minute, you miss everyone out there so bad the bones in your hands hurt. You ain’t set one foot outside this city in a year and spare change, and it sometimes it feels like you can’t breathe. Like your lungs are filling up with liquid metal and your ribs are stuck-up in asbestos and you’ve got white steel leaking out of your mouth. You look down at your stiff gloves and breathe in the wet tar depot smell and remember where you are.

The doors of RUN NO. E12-A013-Z00963B are pared open. You switch on your baton, too.

The train in your dream gives you a bad feeling.

Not bad, really—just weird, just fizzy, just the kind of no-good shiver that prickles your neck and makes you taste benzene for a second. But this is an electric rail, and so the nasty battery pack flavor has got to be a misfired memory. You have those, sometimes. Sometimes you wake up with the pang of your own blood stuck in your mouth for days on end. You gargle and spit and rinse and repeat but it doesn’t go away.

Sometimes it’s more of a coffee taste.

You scope the first car just walking by. The RAZOR CLASS TWO models don’t typically have windows, but this one’s got a few commuter cabins attached, so you can see in—CP doesn’t really care for the idea of civilians getting up to weird shit in the dark. Everything looks OK from the outside. The two guys inside make sure to flash their relocation coupons against the shatterproof glass as you breeze past.

The train in your dream is way, way under-capacity. That makes your funny feelings even worse.

City Seventeen doesn’t admit many emigrants these days, so you’re not sure why it’s taking MP Bently a goddamn age to sweep this thing. You should have checked it out yourself from the get-go, made sure there’s no bad business going on in the crew compartment. You once found a Metrocop with a power drill taking the piss out of a civvie in a gangway. That smell of splattered knuckle and steaming bone is lodged in the back of your nose where your brain sits. You wish that one had been a dream.

But you’re never dreaming when you see those kinds of things, are you. You’re always wide-eyed and bushytailed and goose-stepping in the cavalry line.

As wide-eyed as you can be in a white mask, anyway.

Dr. Breen is still on all the overheads, as always, and he’s still saying:

_I thought so much of City Seventeen that I elected  
thoughtfully provided by  
I have been proud_

All of a sudden, you want to rip the damn mask off. Rip your face right off with it, if you have to. It smells like spit and sweat and like you’re going to black out at any second and wake up twenty years ago, sleeping on your own folded arms inside a rattling Lambda Corp. tram, smelling your own coffee breath. Like you’re somebody’s old toy, a yo-yo twisting on a fragile string. Like you’re suspended. Right before the end.

You freaking hate it in here. You’ve got a little of the claustrophobia. You get into tight, dark spaces and your chest constricts and you see elevator lights and hear metal groaning and you feel so sure you’re about to _—_

A CS-C1 drone putters by and its shutter snaps you out of it. You settle for grabbing the mask’s exhaust valve and giving it a left-right jerk.

These days, at least, you don’t need coffee to stay awake. You get better food than most people and the AFR ANTI-FATIGUE RATIONS keep you on your feet. Downstairs at the CP breakroom, right under the civvie mealbag dispensers, a Vortigaunt cook carries lunch to the private officer cubicles, piping hot and steaming up your masks like somebody’s ma is back there behind the dark kitchen door, just fricasseeing and julienning away, but guess what—it ain’t your ma. CP doesn’t like its slugheads wasting time in lines. They don’t let anybody see anybody’s face, lucky you; so you break the seal on your mouthpiece and scarf as fast as you can. You shovel down the protein-packed oatmeal and glucose-loaded fruit juice and whatever root vegetable is floating on top. You open the little paper pouch and swallow your daily pills all at once like a good boy—your cop B-vitamins and cop caffeine and cop amphetamines and whatever else OVERWATCH wants you to have. They want you shipshape. One of the kitchen workers started sprinkling some kind of rust-red powder on the soup a few weeks ago, smells like salt and fake sour cream. It tastes like noodles that are bad for your heart.

But it beats the hell out of the depression granola bars and dehydrated mushrooms and watered-down starvation gruel they pass out to the civilians upstairs. You don’t know how they stay awake.

Or maybe you do. You have seen what’s on the other side of those dark Combine doors. It’s nothing good. You will never really sleep again.

Which makes this dream hard to explain.

There’s no movement outside the parked RAZOR. You better believe the whole damned platform can hear MP Bently cussing out civvies inside, though. Her PriP has got to be fucking _flying_. You visualize it: _plus one, plus one, plus one, plus one, plus one._

**THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE**

It’s not all threats. Nine hundred and three more points, and you’ll qualify for NC-RMA-C2 NON-COMBINE ROUTINE MEDICINAL ACCESS CLASS 2. Civil Protection will cut you a monthly pharmacy ticket for any Rx you like, no questions asked. And God, wouldn’t a big pink _NC-RMA-C2_ code on your file be just so peachy-freaking-keen? Wouldn’t make this shithole a little easier to sit on? Wouldn’t it solve a metric fuckton of problems for Doctor K and you?—Kleiner gets his meds, and you get to stop filching Humalog and Metformin from pharmicarts, which has damn near blown your cover thrice.

That’s how they really get you, you think. It’s not the stun batons or the bootblack; it’s the blood-thinners, the beta-blockers, the ACE-inhibitors. It’s the COPD mamas and the pacemakers. It’s the goddamn privilege-point scale.

You’re pretty sure that’s how they got Bently, too.

She’s still going strong:

**“YOU BETTER SPIT YOUR TONGUE OUT, ASSHOLE, OR I’LL RIP IT OUT YOUR MOUTH. DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH? LI ANGLISKI? UH, TÜRKÇE BILI—EH, FUCK. TURKISH? YOU SPEAK TURKISH? I NEED A YES OR A NO. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?"**

You try to think of MP Bently’s asthmatic little sister or epileptic kid. Maybe she’s not so bad. Maybe she’s just like you’d be, if you weren’t already who you are. If you hadn’t seen the end of the world where the fault line began.

**“ARE YOU FUCKING BRAIN DAMAGED? CAN YOU READ THIS BADGE, DIPSHIT? YOU WANT A PIECE OF LEAD IN YOUR CEREBELLUM, MOTHERFUCKER? LOOK ME IN THE EYE WHEN I ASK YOU A QUESTION—”**

On second thought—nah. Bently’s as porky as they come.

Your readout blinks:

**PRIVILEGE-POINT DEDUCTION  
NEW SCORE: 0322  
UNJUSTIFIED _IN TRANSIT_  
UPDATE STATUS IMMEDIATELY**

Ah, hell, you’re lightyears from pharm privileges, anyway. One hundred and seventy-eight points from ASAR AUTHORITY-SANCTIONED AUDITORY RECREATION. Four hundred and twenty-eight points from an CC-LPG-C2 LUXURY GOODS CLASS TWO COUPON. Six hundred and seventy-eight from NMRS. But you don’t need fifteen daily minutes of Combine-approved smooth jazz. You don’t really need a five-kilo bag of M&Ms. And you don’t want anything to do with NMRS.

You once tore a tardy MP—real young guy—off one of those NMRS NON-MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION SIMULATION chemical drips only to watch him shriek up, knock you flat on your ass, and first-thing bash his brains open all over a wall. Blood splattered thickly and you couldn’t get a hold of him in time to stop whatever the hell was happening. A million years ago, you’d seen a swallow do the same thing to itself on a glass pane. Black feathers stuck to the shards and now you had this insane boy’s hair smeared on the floor. Scared the absolute shit out of you. Soured you on the whole notion just a little.

You did get 45 PriP for _anticitizen neutralization action_ , though.

In your dream, Breen’s voice is still everywhere, like it’s leaking from the damn walls, leeching into your brain. Like you have got to breathe in this motherfucker.

He says:

_Have you thanked your local Civil Protection officers for keeping our community safe?_

Every month, CP makes you take a physical. They test your eyes and time your reflexes. They shine a pinprick of light into your throat and ears. They send you into this little white room full of cameras, husk you down to your underwear, hook you up to some electrodes, saddle you with a precisely weighted pack, and take you through treadmill paces like a mouse in a wheel. And a thought crosses your mind now and then, as you run. It holds your heels to the track while some empty-eyed mask behind a computer screen watches the numbers of your heart tick up and slow down.

You’ve been chasing ghosts for twenty years. Six you’ve been a Metrocop. How much of this running do you think you’ve got left in you? Fifteen years? Another twenty?

Breen’s on every speaker and he’s still going strong:  
  
 _Remember it was the hand of Our Benefactors that pulled humanity into the stars._

You update your status before you burn five more points for an _unjustified in-transit_ charge. You check your CP USP-MATCH, just like MP Bently. You rap on the cabin just like she did, too. You walk down to Car Five.

As you walk, in your dream, you think of the black-haired woman at the checkpoint. You don’t turn around to eyeball her, because maybe, you hope against hope, you won’t have to larrup the poor thing at all—maybe she’s finally gathered her little salty crackers and lit out of here with the last tatters of her life. But you know she hasn’t. You know she’s watching, too, just like you did. You’ll surely shatter her again in the next couple of seconds, when you and MP-freaking-Bently haul the noncompliant out of this train and it’s not who she wants it to be, because it’s never who she wants it to be. It’s never going to be who she wants it to be, because that’s just not what the world is anymore. 

But what else are the two of you supposed to do?

Here comes Bently. She heard you knock-knock and steps out of Car Seven with a handful of some poor bastard’s jumper collar in her fist.

You look at the time.

You look at the number.

You look at the sun.

You cave in your dream, don’t you. You stop right there on your platform, in front of that RAZOR train, and you look overshoulder for the black-haired woman, after all. Maybe it really is SHANNON BLUM. Maybe the guy MP Bently’s dragging along up Platform 6-3 is him. It might as well be. If this is a dream.

She’s still there. She looks like she’s living in a weird dream of her own, too.

You look back at the black razor train.

In your dream, in your brain, something crazy buzzes on the dark side. You’ve felt this way before.

* * *

**DAY 10 LUNAR 9 REVOLUTION 2023  
зона техники ELECTRIC RAIL STATION PROSPEKT  
HOURS 0600 – 1700  
SHIFT CODE: MP3C GOLD  
RANKING OFFICER: MP 6166.20.3718 PAVELKO**

One day, after you wake up, you’ll talk to her.

You don’t want to. You avoid chatting up civilians—best not to get too chummy, you know. But tomorrow, the morning after your dream, will make it eight days since the black-haired woman appeared at STATION PROSPEKT. Your off-duty cycle is coming up fast. You don’t know the MP who takes over the OPTICON on your rest rotation, or what to expect he’ll do to a civvie hanging on a checkpoint fence. She doesn’t have much time.

You’re lucky you both speak English. Your Russian’s pretty good, but your Turkish is wobbly, your Serbian flat-out sucks, and you don’t have a shot at Vietnamese.

You will spot her on the way into the depot. It’ll be a bright, chilly morning, the kind that still makes you think of pencil shavings and bruised green pears. It’ll be nineteen minutes from oh-six hundred when you climb the dewy front steps; you’re never late anymore; you’re always early (but not too early). Your lungs will feel nicely damp from your bike ride in, and your uniform still smells a bit like gasoline. It’s your favorite part of the day.

You’ll put your mask on before you step inside.

The lettering above the entrance hall probably said something else once. Now it says:

**STATION PROSPEKT**

You’ll cross the marble vestibule, your metal gloves and boots gleaming in the aftermath of fog. It was grand in here, you imagine, once. Your footsteps echo under high ceilings, and you’ll walk down a hallway of skinny church-house windows that haven’t been scrubbed in too long, letting in a dingy orange sunrise. You’ll unlock and push open the iron-wrought accordion gate, forcing its hinges, grimacing at the violent scrape. You’ll dip through a wooden door.

And there she’ll be.

The black-haired woman will be sitting alone in the desolate cafeteria, nestled away at a corner table—just like she has been every daylight shift for a week—waiting for the platforms to open. She’ll wear dark undereye circles and keep her hands to herself, trying to be small with a can of B Reserve water and a pouch of CR-C3 CIVILIAN RATIONS CLASS THREE cereal in front of her. It must be yesterday’s breakfast, because the food dispensary won’t boot up for another two hours. You won’t care enough to ask.

You won’t even have planned on talking to her, not really. But you’ll look around as you walk by, your bootheels too loud on the freshly bleached tile, and notice you’re the only two people in here. A CS-C1 will go bouncing through the air outside the big old-fashioned double-door, looking almost chipper, beeping and clicking in an upswirl of crinkly leaves. You’ll either do something or you won’t.

So you will.

She’ll be trying to eat her dry cereal from the pack as quietly as possible, but you’ve eaten that shit, too; no matter how long you hold the crisps in your mouth, flavorless and rough and cutting your tongue, they won’t soften. Her crunching will sound as loud as your boots in the silent station. She must think it’s about to earn her a split lip, because she’ll sort of cover her mouth when you clack over there like she’s done something wrong. Her shoulders will hunch up to her dark ponytail. She won’t make eye contact with your mask.

You’re not a real big brickhouse-type fellah, but the MP getup makes civvies look at you like you’re nine feet tall. You’ll knock your fist on the table twice in a real unsociable kind of way. She’ll swallow her bite fast and her eyes will tear as the shitty cereal scratches all the way down.

You never see her leave, you realize. Surely nobody’s letting her sleep in here. Not MP Bently. No way.

The voice that comes from your mask will say:

**“CITIZEN, FOLLOW ME.”**

She’ll figure her time is up. And so she’ll stand, anesthetized, too tired of watching and waiting to bother trembling about it. She won’t even protest. She’ll just rise, step over the bench, and reach back real quick to tug her ponytail tighter. Then she’ll pick up her broken backpack and go.

She’ll drop her cereal pack in the trash on the way to Processing. You’ll follow her down the grungy corridor—the last place anyone wants to go—and all the way to the back room.

You shouldn’t be doing this. This is marginally insane. Just in a risk-benefit sense—all risk, no benefit—not to you, and not to the Resistance, neither. But everything’s different since yesterday, isn’t it. It’s the same, but it’s different. Since your dream.

You’re insane now. For a while.

You’ll slam open the sliding door and the voice that comes from your mask will bark:

**“GET IN.”**

She won’t try to talk her way out of it. Just stall there for a moment, suck in a sharp breath, and walk right on in.

The clock in your mask will read _0542_. Eighteen minutes until you’re expected in the OPTICON, until you touch your chip to the scanner, and this whole place grows eyes.

The voice that comes from your mask will order:

**“SIT DOWN.”**

She will not wait for you to grab her neckbones and shove her into the rusty metal chair. She’ll sit in the only place she can, stiff-backed, almost primly, a different version of the wide-eyed person eating stale corn puffs you just saw outside. She won’t smart off—hell no—but something prickles in her inky stare, a clarity that wasn’t there before. She’ll ignore her surroundings: the central drain at her feet, the yellow snarl of human hair still caught on the grill, the slight downwards tilt to the floor, the brown corrosion tracks that might be blood or something else. And even though she won’t succeed—not completely—she’ll lean forward, clenching her jaw, like her teeth are holding something back. Maybe she’ll just think there is nothing left to lose.

Maybe you’ll think the same thing. At this hour—for the littlest while longer—the OPTICON’s down and the trains are locked up and the cameras are toast and the main floor’s quiet. But all it takes is one early bird. If anyone walks in here, you’ll think, you’re freaking boned.

You’ll look at your clock again. Seventeen minutes and a handful of seconds.

You’ll reach for your throat. You’ll hit the pressure. You’ll palm your hand over your whole face, and you’ll pull off the mask.

“All right,” you’ll say. _You’ll_ say—it’s your voice in here, not MP Pavelko’s. Your skin will feel dangerous and vulnerable and the dank air will tickle your bare nose. You’ll say: “What’s it gonna take?”

She’ll look horrified, briefly, to see a whole person under there. It’s easier to receive cruelty from a uniform. For a half-minute, she’ll just jolt back in that chair and stare at you wildly—scowling, almost—offended you’d have shaken up her conception of the new world like this.

You suppose you don’t really enjoy the thought of seeing MP Bently’s face, either.

“What the hell is it going to take,” you’ll ask again, slower this time, enunciating every word, “to get you out of my station?”

She’ll knock herself out of the daze, twist her chin sharply away, and—like someone’s slapped the back of her head—she’ll spit this out all at once:

“I’m waiting for my husband. The officer who stopped our train said he’d be on the next one.” That’s what she’ll tell you—the same damn thing she’s been telling everyone nonstop. “His name is Shannon Blum; his serial is _see-three six thirty_ —”

“Look, Mrs. Blum—”

“Huỳnh,” she’ll interrupt you. Seeing you have a face like hers—with cheekfat and eyelashes and front teeth and a hairline and everything—will make her nervous and angry, and she’ll grab the uncomfortable armrests until her knuckles flex. You’ll notice she’s missing a few fingernails on her left hand. “My name is Wrenna Huỳnh. My serial is _see-three six thirty-three_ —”

“Ma’am, I don’t want to be abrasive, and I am sorry for your situation, but I don’t know what else to tell you. He ain’t here,” you’ll say. You’ve never heard your real voice in this room before. It echoes oddly in the tight corners and the mildewed brick. There’s no desk or anything like one, so you’ll sit against the control panel, black screens to your back, palm heels pressed into the sleeping keys. “It’s damn near a week you’ve been standing out there, holding on to that gate. You need to think about yourself.”

With your mask sitting on the keyboard beside you, her eyes look harder than they do exhausted, and it will become clear one of those fine lines isn’t a wrinkle or an epicanthal fold but a scar. She’ll do her damnedest not to see anything else in here—not the cameras, not the baton on your belt, not the dentist-lamp-looking horror contraption that hangs on a metal appendage behind her head. Maybe it’s not her first rodeo.

“We didn’t have pre-assigned housing when we left City Sixteen. Civil Protection told us to apply in-person when we arrive. So you understand why I’m stuck. He could miss me, and—”

Your nose will twitch. Suddenly, embarrassingly. You’ll waggle it, trying not to sneeze. You’ll sneeze anyway.

“Gesundheit.” She’ll say it automatically—the old ritual falls flat out of her mouth and slaps the bloodstained floor like a dead fish. You’ll both look confused about it. Neither one of you knows what to do now.

Of course, the clock doesn’t care what you know. It just keeps ticking. Even when nothing feels like real life anymore, and you can’t tell if you’re dreaming or insane.

“I’m not trying to be difficult,” she’ll add, still not looking. It will seem less like deference and more like she’s trying not to snap on you. “But I can’t leave until I get some sort of communication from OVERWATCH. He’s got all our papers. I can’t request our housing assignment without papers.”

“That’s a very sad story, but I got to run this platform. I can’t have you dangling on my fence, looking sad. So what’s going to make sure I never see you again? You want a C2 sleeper voucher until you figure out your paper situation?”

“I want to know where OVERWATCH sent my husband. I’ve said that a dozen—I’ve said it several times now.”

“You imagine I can just call ‘em up? Just pick up the phone and ring the administrator?”

“I don’t know. But whatever it is, I’m asking you to do it right now.”

“Ma’am, I work at a train station.”

“ _Yeah_ ,” she’ll snap, finally. You’ve pissed her off, and the temper skitters out and hits the floor, too. “We’ve established that.”

You’ll be getting a little pissed off, too. You’ll wonder why she doesn’t know what you know: that any other Metrocop would’ve just Code One-Forty-Eighted a blunt object into the back of her skull. For a second, you won’t understand why she can’t stop making your life hard and jeopardizing your cover; why she won’t clamp her trap shut and be grateful for all the profoundly fucked-up shit you could have but didn’t do.

You got to be real careful about this jackboot act. You hate the Metropolice more than anything else on Earth. You’ve never liked cops. You’re not a hot-tempered guy. But you lock your flesh-and-blood face behind a white mask long enough, and you’ll start to feel your resting blood temperature rise.

“What is not sinkin’ in for you here, lady,” you’ll snap back, and you’ll stand up off the console without meaning to, forgetting your metal face on the dash. “Do you know what we do in this room? Do you understand just where the hell you are right now? Do they got nicer Metrocops in City Sixteen?”

She won’t be stupid enough to answer that. Maybe she’s a 10-103-M: mentally unfit citizen. But you’re insane now, remember—you’re as good as a 10-103, too. There’s no code for _mentally unfit officer_. Maybe, when you get caught, they’ll name it after you.

“I am trying to help you,” you’ll say, and without your vocoder, it will sound less like a threat and more like a plea.

“Can you look him up, please? Wouldn’t he be in your records or something? His name is Blum,” she’ll try, weakly. The anger will go all wobbly-kneed, and she’ll have to clear her throat, and her face will look morose again. Like someone’s thrown all her crackers on the floor. “Bee-el-you-em. It’s Shannon Blum.”

“I think you know he is not in my records.”

“You must have a centralized database of ID codes. You just said CP issues sleeper vouchers, so they’ve got to have a record of civilians who are pre-registered for housing; you wouldn’t hand hostel beds out to anyone. You’d need a method of cross-referencing registries, let alone distributing the vouchers.”

Your blood will stop boiling, thinking of how you humiliated her on 6-3—of that broken bag full of all those inane little people things, pitiable and precious, spilled across the station floor. You’ll wonder if she even knows that was you. Not that you were ever really angry with her. Or any little people. Or any scientists. Or any science.

It just feels that way, sometimes.

You’ll feel a weird need to break the silence. It’s the insanity, you’ll think. You’ll sigh.

“Were you a lawyer, by any chance.”

You’ll see the twitch of her mouth. Her eyes crinkle, too, but without joy. It’s a face you make all the time. “Legal advisor.”

“Criminal?”

“Hell no. Finance law—campaigns, mostly. You remember Rudy Giuliani?”

“Jesus H. Christ.”

“Heh. My first and final client.”

“Guess you would be out of business, yeah.”

You’ll turn around and boot up the computer. It groans awake like it’s eighty years old.

She won’t say anything about it, and neither will you. You won’t turn around to see if she looks hopeful, and you won’t hear her so much as breathe.

You’ll look him up. Again, because you’ve done it before, haven’t you—you’ve searched for the name SHANNON BLUM on your lunch break and in all the daily passenger listings—but you won’t find anything this time, either. Meanwhile, she’ll just sit in the chair with both elbows pressed tight to her sides like she’s got a stomach ache. She’ll look lost. Waiting. Like she’s right back on the cold links of that gate, watching for someone whom she knows deep in her bones isn’t anywhere, anymore.

Breencast boots up outside. You can hear it underneath the black backdoor and through the storage closet window, where crisp Cycle Nine air carries it in from the plaza obelisk.

He says:

_Good morning! The sun is rising and it’s time for all of us to shine, City Seventeen. You’re in luck; I’m looking out my office window, and it appears we have a beautiful, breezy day on our hands. I hope you have slept well and are ready to join me in welcoming another productive cycle under the watchful eye of Our Benefactors._

Breencast kicks in exactly five minutes before everything else in City Seventeen, which means it’s past time for you to get out of here. You’ll turn around to find she is looking right at you.

“Listen,” you’ll say, and your arm will itch to rub the back of your neck, so you’ll fold both across your chest and do your best to muster a dark look. “I’ll tolerate you down there one more day. But that’s it. For your own good: please, please, PLEASE go away. Don’t be here tomorrow,” you’ll tell her. She’ll stare at you with unhearing eyes. “You got me?”

“Our coupons. You don’t understand. He has my relocation coupon. I don’t even have a residency claim.”

“Then take the sleeper and go to a hostel like everyone else. I’ll have one voucher added to your file.”

It’s a defeat, somehow, on a level you’ll see you don’t understand. C3-633.9821.4547.12.72-C16 Wrenna Huỳnh will slump forward, elbows atop her thighs, and drill her fingers into her creased brow.

Silence—and Breen, of course, outside:

_Before we commence with a morning meditation and the daily Breenmail, I’d like to take a moment apart to thank our Civil Protection officers for their tireless efforts in keeping this community safe. Metropolice, know your service does not go unappreciated. As we conduct today’s business, let us be sure to keep these selfless men and women in our hearts and minds, and recognize that we are never truly outside their—_

“Yeah,” she’ll murmur. Outside, over the cobblestone plaza with its black steel barricades and dying apricot trees, Breen will switch to some guided breathing exercises. She won’t make any move to get up. “OK.”

“I’m not a bastard, OK? But you either disappear or I’ll disappear you. Understand?”

“OK,” she’ll fob, motionless, a thousand miles away. “I understand.”

“And when I go down to 6-3 tomorrow morning, I’m not going to see you. Right?”

 _Right_ , she’ll say.

You won’t bother asking again. You’ll put your mask on, holding your breath as the colorless round eyes descend upon yours; you’ll wrench open the sliding door; you’ll tell her to, and she’ll leave. You’ll go on to your shift, walking briskly, clapping up the claustrophobic stairwell and into the OPTICON. You’ll turn on all the lights. You’ll watch all the trains. You’ll look at all your screens.

The fence outside Platform 6-3 will stay clear. There will be no black ponytail and no fingers with missing nails hooked through the chain-link fence.

You won’t see her again, you’re sure. The ghost of relief fills up your mask and you breathe it in. You’ll go back to work. You’ll open your eyes and you’ll sit at your station and you’ll watch—

**  
DAY 10 LUNAR 9 REVOLUTION 2023  
зона техники ELECTRIC RAIL STATION PROSPEKT  
OPTICON**

**WELCOME OFFICER  
PAVELKO, JOEL J.  
MP 6166.20.3718-C17  
ASSIGNMENT: STATION PROSPEKT  
DETAIL: ELECTRIC RAIL OVERSEER  
SHIFT CODE: CP-MP-02 GOLD  
CIVIL PROTECTION PRIVILEGE-POINT SCORE: 0306**

**THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE  
  
**

But she’s there the next day.

* * *

You don’t recognize him. In your dream.

For a second—just a second, but it’s there—you don’t even fucking recognize Gordon. Like you don’t know him.

Like you haven’t seen his ghost about sixty thousand times and whenever you blink too long.

Like you don’t freeze in the dark now-and-then, and suddenly every tendon and tissue of your body feels like it’s back in Black Mesa and the world’s unstitching around you, and there’s your friend Gordon Freeman in this bright, bright hall and his coat is too white and his hair is too red and his glasses are too thick and his eyes look acid green and he’s glowing, you know it; he’s radioactive and he says goodbye to you on his way to open the gate to Hell.

Like you didn’t spend years looking for so much as his initials on every OVERWATCH list you saw.

Like your animal guts didn’t know something was wrong with this train the second it pulled up.

Like you don’t nod into something like sleep sometimes, blacking out in a cold shower or in front of a screen or on the spare cot in Kleiner’s lab or sitting on your bike outside your officer’s apartment with blood on your baton and in your mouth and you seize up suddenly with his face burning under your eyelids and your heart inflating beneath your tongue and the electricity in your brain screaming I COULD HAVE STOPPED HIM I COULD HAVE STOPPED HIM I COULD HAVE—

Like you don’t still have the nightmares in your bones, in your atoms, even if you don’t remember them when you wake up.

YOU COULD HAVE STOPPED HIM

Like you don’t hear that.

YOU COULD HAVE STOPPED IT

Like you are dreaming.

_Welcome! Welcome to City Seventeen. You have chosen—or been chosen—_

He’s haggard with an old bloody nose and rumpled clothes and some existential terror but that’s not it—that’s not it, at all—you’d have recognized him if it was just blood and terror, if it was just twenty years. It’s that he doesn’t have his glasses on. Not right then, in that first second you saw him. They’re in his hands, those unspeakably ugly old horn-rims. They’re pinched delicately in the front of his jumpsuit—his wrists are shaking as they try to clean a smear—MP Bently slaps them out and onto the floor.

And oh my God, you almost kill her. Something in you turns savage and you swear you can’t see anything for a long red second except a pulse where you know the big blue vein lives inside her throat, under her mask.

The clatter of plastic on the concrete snaps you back into the world.

_—have been proud to call City Seventeen my home. And so, whether you are here to stay or passing through on your way to parts unknown—_

**“—GOT ON A RAZOR WITHOUT A SHRED OF I.D. NO HOUSING ASSIGNMENT, NO CEE-THREE-ARE-CEE, NO DISPUP CARD. GOT TO BE EITHER A TEN ONE-OH-THREE OR A REAL DUMB CODE SIXTY-THREE. CAN’T EVEN GET LANGUAGE CONFIRM OUT OF—”**

_—it’s safer here._

You step on the glasses before they skitter onto the rail. You gently take your boot off the lens.

Bently’s still talking. You only hear a couple of words before Gordon looks up at you and Bently disintegrates. You know it’s him. His red hair is kind of dirty and he’s got a gross-looking shiner and some of that nose blood has dried up in his dorky moustache; his shoulders are hunched defensively and look frailer than they ever did in a lab coat; he looks like he hasn’t eaten a hot meal in a week; he’s too tall for his mass and there’s an uncomfortable energy about him, always, as if he’s trying to be small enough that he won’t offend the world. He looks like a little old man who just shuffled out of a bombed-out building. But it’s Gordon.

But it can’t be him because he died.

_Welcome! Welcome to City Seventeen. You have chosen—_

But maybe you died, too. Maybe you stood up too fast in the OPTICON and had a heart attack from all the meth-laced AFR ANTI-FATIGUE RATIONS or Bently found you out and put a bullet in your skull or Wrenna Huỳnh finked you to OVERWATCH in exchange for a piece of paper with an address on it or a basket of Clementines or maybe you turned yourself in for a volunteer memory wipe because you couldn’t fucking take the white mask smell another second or maybe the Combine scooped your brain stem and you’re a stalker and this is just a stalker dream.

You pick up the glasses. You look at them down in your hands. There’s one big veiny crack. You go into shock.

That’s what this is, all right. You’re deep-water diving. You can’t hear anything except the breath circling in your filter like you’re a synth with a tank of oxygen hooked to your lungs. Everything is sharks. The CS-C1s chirp and whistle overhead and they’re all black holes. The Metrocops have oysters for eyes and can swallow him whole. The civilians grow barracuda teeth—if they knew who he was, if they knew what he did to the world, they’d go apeshit and swarm and eat him into bloody pieces. Oh, you’re in shock, for sure; you know what this feels like; and everything that isn’t you and isn’t Gordon is abyss around you, a void waiting to gulp him back up, to take him away again. He wasn’t here for so long. But he came back—no one ever comes back, but he came back, and Gordon always looks out for you and he’s here even though he blew up and the whole world ended and you are twenty-three years old and they left you at the bottom of that elevator to die and now you’re forty-two years old and nobody came back for you, not even once, but he did, didn’t he, and he’s right there. He’s fragile as an egg yolk. As a handful of snow. You’ve got to get him out of here.

Inside you, where the scanners can’t see, something young and terrified grabs for his shirt and sobs behind the white mask and shrieks like a banshee and screams _get me out of here, man._

But Gordon doesn’t know it’s you. He looks like he’s in shock, too.

Bently says:

**“—INISH MY SWEEP. PROCESS AND FILE A COUNTER-OBEYANCE TICKET CODE FIVE-OH—”**

Your ears are buzzing and you can’t even hear yourself breathe anymore. You’re not sure you are. You say something to Bently. You have no idea what it is.

You fold Gordon Freeman’s glasses and tuck them into your neckpiece before you lose them.

Then she pushes him. Gordon stumbles forward, and you catch Gordon by the shoulders, and without even thinking about it you squeeze hard enough that you feel the big bones under the shitty civvie blues and the thin skin and you hurt him and he jumps and he pulls his arms to his chest and he recoils under your hands.

You’re insane now. You’re insane now and insane tomorrow and maybe insane the next day, too, if there even are different days anymore and not just one long stream of this day for all time—in which case, it looks like you’re insane forever, aren’t you.

You let go.

You get him to walk.

You get him into the hallway.

You get him through the black Combine door.

You get him into the horrible room alone. You’ve walked him all the way there, step-after-step-after-step through the minefield, as your cerebrum breaks apart and into lagan inside your skull, and you slam the door closed behind you. You shut everything down. Everything. Even the lights. You stop short of bashing through the big interrogation screen and pulling its wire guts out with your fist. And you turn around and there he is.

He’s sitting in that awful metal chair, as good as real in your dream. And you’re crushed in the space of a second. Crushed as in particle-split—as in utterly fucking pulverized—as in decimated—as in levelled by a nuke or by a radioactive disaster. Because he looks at you like they all look at you. He doesn’t recognize you—and your heart fists up, because maybe he doesn’t know you. Maybe you don’t even know Gordon Freeman. Maybe you made it all up; maybe they hit you with a direct shot from the fuckin’ gonad death ray or a stun baton or a big jug of amnesia serum right to your brain stem and your memories aren’t real. Maybe nobody ever did look out for you. Maybe you swam through the mouth of Hell all alone and you have no excuse to have lived all these years and this whole thing is dreamspace, too.

Maybe you’re still in Black Mesa. Maybe you hit the bottom and never woke up.

Then you remember the white mask.

It registers the fear on his face and gives you a _plus one, plus one, plus one_.

**THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE**

Gordon starts to say something in the darkness—starts to ask you a question, maybe, or explain himself—but you can’t hear it. Your hands are trembling inside the black gloves and there’s sweat plicking from your nose and into your vocoder.

You take a vial from the dispenser on the far wall.

You screw it into a syringe. You drop it. It rolls somewhere. You dispense another one and get it loaded this time.

You walk up on the chair.

It’s dark. You have his glasses. He can’t see you.

He can’t see and you can’t hear, but in the empty black of the room, you catch the edge of his voice:

_I just woke—_

You hit him in the deltoid. His gasp is sharp and brittle. The intramuscular sedative steals his breath before Gordon can say _up_.

The dark is quiet again. In your dream, he sleeps.

* * *

**DAY 11 LUNAR 9 REVOLUTION 2023  
зона техники ELECTRIC RAIL STATION PROSPEKT  
OPTICON**

**WELCOME OFFICER  
PAVELKO, JOEL J.**

**THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE  
  
**

Two days after your black train dream—when you’re fully awake but still batshit out of your mind—and she’s still there, just as batshit as you are, hanging on Platform 6-3—you’ll talk to Wrenna Huỳnh again. It’s the kind of conversation you never want to have.

She will have no way of recognizing you in the white mask. You don’t have a face right now, so C3-633.9821.4547.12.72-C16 WRENNA HUỲNH will yank her fingers out of the chain-link and backpedal real fast when you approach. She’ll have remembered your warning, at least. Even if she won’t remember you.

But then you’ll speak. You won’t think it through; your stomach will have dropped too quickly and too fatally when you saw that dark ponytail waiting at the gate.

You’ll say:

**“NO, NO, NO, DARLIN—”**

You’ll say:

**“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?”**

You’ll say:

**“WE TALKED ABOUT THIS.”**

And the wilderness of _darlin’_ —of that bland, no-skin-off-my-ass endearment, something you’d have once _kitty-kittied_ to a cat up a tree as soon as said to a person—will register on her face before it shows up in your brain. Her eyes will widen and her jaw will swing open until you can see her bottom teeth, and only then will you realize what you’ve done. Your tongue will wither behind the vocoder. You’ll feel speechless, but only for a second. You won’t believe that fell out of your mouth. Like you forgot the cameras. Like you forgot you are wearing OVERWATCH’s eyes. Like you forgot, somehow, everything.

You better believe she’ll recognize you after that, though.

“I’m not causing trouble,” she’ll protest, and hold her ground—sad little ground that it is—because you’ve fucked up your slughead act too much, and now she thinks you’re a person. Maybe the Combine have a point about these masks. Maybe faces just get people in trouble. Maybe there’s something about the eyes. “I’m just waiting on my—”

You’ll say:

**“YOU’RE ABOUT TO GET TROUBLE. GET OFF THE FUCKING GATE.”**

But she won’t move, will she. She’ll ball her fists and swallow so hard you can see it and say, “I’m not violating any social codes. This is a designated waiting area. Until someone can—”

You’ll say:

**“THIS IS A DIRECT ORDER: STEP BACK FROM THE FENCE AND LEAVE THE PREMESIS.”**

“—some sort of real information about my—”

You’ll say:

**“YOU’VE GOT FIVE SECONDS TO CLEAR OUT. LAST WARNING.”**

“If he’s not—if he’s fucking dead, then just fucking tell me that, and I’ll leave. You can’t ask me to do jack shit without knowing where you people have my husband. Don’t expect me to—”

It was just a second you slipped up with her, wasn’t it. But seconds are what kill you in the new world. And now she’ll get the anticitizen look. And if you’re a person under that mask, now she’ll remember she’s a person, too, and you can’t treat people this way. And now she can’t be pushed another inch. And now you’ll have to make up for it.

You won’t talk to her anymore.

You’ll say:

**“PLATFORM 6-3. CITIZEN IS MALCOMPLIANT.”**

“I said if you FUCKING KILLED HIM, why don’t you FUCKING SAY SO AND I’LL—”

You’ll say:

**“CODE FIVE-OH-SEVEN. ISSUING CITATION.”**

You’ll turn on your baton and turn off your mind.

* * *

In your dream, you scoop him up out of the chair.

You don’t even know what to do with him. He’s terrifyingly light and you can feel ribs through the civvies. His head tips back over your bicep and you don’t tranq people in the neck; you’ve seen what happens when those big-ass OVERWATCH needles miss; but there’s a blood pimple right under Gordon’s chin that catches your eye, some other officer’s injection site. It’s one freckle among the bunch of them dusted there that’s just a little too thick and red.

Your mind races with conspiracies: _Did CP-C16 dope him and sit him on the C-17 OUTBOUND? Why would they do that? What’s the name on his ID? Because there’s no way that serial’s right. There’s no way it says FREEMAN, GORDON—_

But it’s much worse than a pinprick. There’s this sinister yellow bruise wrapped all the way around his throat, across the apple and under the lymph nodes at the back of his jaw. It sort of looks like an electric burn. You don’t know what the fuck could have done that. You shouldn’t have picked him up, you dumb hick; he’s way, way too skinny; mortifyingly skinny; you haven’t even checked his pulse, which is the first thing a rookie knows to do after you dose a civvie, supposing you’re at all invested in not having ‘em croak; and why can’t you pull your ass together and scrape your nickels back into your head and think, man, _think_! But you couldn’t bear to leave him in that evil chair. They torture people in that chair. They’ll slap you down and dope you up and pluck your teeth and slit your ears, soak the seat with blood and piss. There’s nowhere else to put him but you sure as shit can’t put him back down in that fucking thing.

You just stand there for a brainscattered moment, cradling this whole man limp as lettuce in your arms and your marbles all over the dirty tile floor.

Does it feel like Gordon? You’ve never held him like a baby with a shot of ketamine in his body. How would you know?

Trying to fix his flopped-back head is useless. You shift him over your shoulder so you can use your hands and so you don’t have to see how dead he looks.

You didn’t want to tranq him. But you couldn’t think with him there, looking at you, like a message from the dead. Like a blood vessel misfired in your brain. Like you’ve really lost it this time, and you’re never ever coming back.

And you’ve got to think.

Even in your dream, you have got to find out if this is real.

In the dark, in your dream, Administrator Breen says:

_—inflict a fatal injury on our species. Instinct creates its own oppressors, and bids us rise up against them. Instinct tells us that the unknown is a threat, rather than an opportunity. Instinct slyly and covertly compels us away—_

You carry him—head dangling over your back like a baby—out of the interrogation hall, out of the dark, and downstairs to the morgue. You lock the door behind you. You pull off your mask.

It’s dark in here, too. You lay the body out on the sanitized steel table to look him over.

He doesn’t so much as twitch. The sickly pallor resettles over his skin as gravity does its thing. Someone’s had him in restraints; you can tell from the bumps behind his wrist bones. One of his eyes is puffy, and he looks overall like he’s been in a real slow fight, the kind that erodes you at an atomic level, cutting stitches you can’t afford to unstitch. There’s some blood in his mouth, drying into a black line under the weight of his top lip, and his shitty adjunct faculty ponytail’s long gone.

You mean to get a closer look, to check for synth mesh inside the scrapes or some other sign this meat isn’t human, but you take one step toward the gleaming table where he’s stretched out, prone as a cadaver, and you’re about to faint. You prop your palms on your kneecaps and bow over ‘til it passes.

It looks like Gordon. But does it really, _really_?

You do what you do when you’re not sure what to do. You call her.

You say:

_BLUEBIRD TO FUNNYBIRD, come in.  
Come back, FUNNYBIRD._

She picks up immediately. “What’s going on, Uncle B?”

Something snarled inside you unclenches. “Alyx, where are you?”

Her voice is always bright and tight when you pop up on your secret frequency. Bright because she loves you and that’s who she is. Tight because she loves you and maybe something is wrong. Maybe it won’t be you on the other end. Maybe there will be dead air. Maybe you’ll drop your red alert and she’ll have to listen as a Metrocop captain kicks in the door and blows a hole in the back of your head.

Not today, though. Her nerves relax—just a little. “On my way to the lab. I’m in Route C, just heading into the tunnels. Probably about to lose signal in a minute. Something up?”

“Look, snickelfritz. I’m at work so I have got to keep this short.” Your palms are sweaty. You can’t leave prints; you wipe them on your Kevlar chest without realizing your gloves are still on. “But I have got an entire bitch of a situation on my hands and I need you to help me out of it.”

“Barney, are you OK? You sound—”

Gordon lies there, breathing. You say: “I got a scientist.”

“Hey, that’s great! What species? Tell me it’s a biologist. Is it a biologist? Dad could really use—”

“I’ve got a freaking AnMat scientist,” you say, and that word makes it realer, somehow. These scientists are all you’ve lived for and all you’ve thought about since you’ve been the You you are now. This is the endgame you’ve worked toward across the last twenty years, name-by-name, doctor-by-doctor, line-by-line down your old Black Mesa personnel list. This is why you scour records and chase ghosts. This is why you watch trains.

She’s quiet. You wonder if you’ve lost the connection, or if maybe she can hear the insanity warbling up your throat. But she’s there.

“Are you”—her voice is small—“sure?”

“Oh, I’m sure.” You don’t realize you’re pacing until your shiny bootheel squeaks on the tile. This room is cleaner than the others, but it’s a strange cleanliness. The walls are loaded with airtight black cabinets—body coolers. The cremator’s downstairs. “He walked right into the station. I pulled him out of the line and now I’ve just… I’ve just _got_ him here. I’m wondering if this is some kind of trap, or—”

She whuffs. “Holy shit, Barney.”

You hear a rusty grate hinge. The sewers aren’t really safety, but it beats Breen’s open blue sky, full of CITY SCANNERS and constant eyes. She’d already be down there if it weren’t for your call, and the thought of her standing under an overpass like a sitting duck with punkin dimples makes you a little pissed at yourself, to be honest. 

But you can’t do this all by yourself. And you and Alyx aren’t really important. Not like that. Not to the world. Nothing is lost, really, if you die.

“And you’re at _work_ -work?” she urges. “You’ve got to get him out of there now. Like—right now.”

You turn around to check Gordon’s breathing again. Touching him on that table seems like it will electrocute and kill you dead on the spot.

“Yeah, obviously, thanks, that’s real helpful.” And because she loves you and you didn’t mean to snap: “Sorry. I am bugging out. I am like two inches from sailing off the deep end right now, you get me?”

“What are you thinking?”

“Well, I can’t just walk him down the front steps. It’s the middle of my shift. I’m going to try to get him on-foot as far as two hundred East Fifth. There’s a funky curb angle over there and as long as we don’t run into any See-Ones, it should keep us off-camera. Can you meet me by that big green water tank? Take the alleys.”

“Better idea. If you can risk dipping under the checkpoint at East Ninth, I’ll cut through the old rain sewer. Then he and I can just run right up under Uncle K’s place.”

“It’s a plan. Call Kleiner and tell him we’re coming. Don’t take any unnecessary risks, all right?”

You hope she takes it to heart. But you can’t make her; Alyx is as old as you were when Black Mesa opened the door and destroyed everything. She’s taller and tougher and ten times smarter than you were, too, or than any twenty-four-year-old could’ve been in the World Before. You’ve made sure of it. Even so, you have to hold yourself back, sometimes, because she’ll be stripping the plates from an OVERWATCH machine with a blowtorch and all you’ll see is this spring-curled nine-year-old girl with chopped off little pigtails and scabby knees.

She knows she shouldn’t risk asking, but can’t help it. “Is it Keller?”

“Not quite,” you say.

You won’t have kids of your own. You never even had time to think about it Before, and now all that shit’s been decided. And this kid’s already got a dad—doesn’t need two. But every time you talk on the radio, you don’t see a spy on the other end. You see a seven-year-old flapping wildly in shallow water—and you’re supposed to be teaching her to swim—and you grab her by the shirt so she doesn’t sink, laughing, _what are you, some kind of funny-looking gooney bird?_ —and you know she’s as close to a daughter as you’re ever going to get.

When you die—if there aren’t any trains or scientists left—you wonder who she’ll keep alive and what she’ll watch instead.

“I got to go, honey; we’re taking enough chances, as it is.”

“OK,” Alyx says. And then, because she always says it—every single time—like it’s a rule she’s made for herself, just in case: “Love you.”

She never says goodbye.

“You, too,” you tell her, since it’s true. “See you there.”

You pull out the earpiece she rigged up for you—tech as undetectable as only a Vance can make—wet the adhesive with the tip of your tongue, and stick it back on your collarbone. You recheck the lock on the door.

And now you’re alone with him again.

Talking to Alyx made you feel a little better. You get a grip. You feel cold adrenaline course down your arms, dousing the shock. You’ve got work to do, after all.

Gordon is feverish. You toss your gloves into the slop sink and bunch up his scratchy blue sleeve, hunting for a pulse at the elbow. His bare arm terrifies you. You’re too chickenshit to touch his mangled neck.

It’s funny, you know? In a way. In a fucky woo-woo _ain’t-that-a-trip_ insane sort of way, a way that plops the harbinger of End Times right back in your lap. Time is wonky in dreams; in yours, you can’t remember it’s been twenty years. You mindlessly reach for his clavicle to pull the Lambda Corp. lanyard from under that ugly red tie he always wore, stuffed in his lab coat like a robin’s breast. You come up empty, obviously. There is just bone under the thin skin of his chest.

It’s him, though. In your dream.

You wake him up.

The reversal agent doesn’t kick in as fast as the ketamine. You feed the syringe slowly; his lip winces over his canines. Movement stirs under the lashes first.

You lay the empty vial aside and, with your bare hand, delicately slap the hollow of his cheek.

He cracks an eye, rolls it up like a whale, and slips back under the surface.

 _Gordon,_ you whisper. You don’t know why you whisper. It just seems like the thing to do. “Gordon, come on, man. Wake up.”

In your dream, he gasps awake all at once.

Gordon lurches up so hard, and you’re bent so close to his face, and you aren’t ready for it; you collide head-on. His chin slams into your nose and electricity snaps in your skull, and you’re too surprised to cuss. Your sinuses crackle and you wonder distantly if it’s broken. Instinct makes you latch onto his scrawny shoulders and flatten him down to the table. Instinct makes him fight you, instantly; his back bangs on the cold steel, and he thrashes, rattling the whole thing and pawing with his heels and trying to shrimp an arm free; and you struggle to keep him where you’ve got him, keep him from hurting himself, pain-tears breaking down your cheeks; and his eyes are blown so wide you can circle the whites around the sulfur green. You wrestle in miniature. He’s too panicked and too near-sighted to see.

You win this one. It isn’t much of a fight. He’s as mad as a jackrabbit and you’re the snare.

“Gordon, _shh_! Calm down,” you urge him, but he only seems to hear his name. His civvie shoe whacks the table leg awkwardly, and you stretch a forearm across his chest, docking the elbow just beside his ear to apply your weight. You’re not sure if he can see your face.

“It’s me,” you hush, as if anyone could hear you, as if you’ll get in trouble with these walls. “You’re all right. It’s me, Gordon! Stop, man, hold on—just—just—”

It’s Barney, you say.

You’ve never said your real name in here before. It’s tinny, ridiculous, inside this metal cage.

Barney, you say again. From Black Mesa.

He stops beneath your arms and within your fists. He stares straight up—clean through your face and to the black ceiling—and you loosen your handfuls of his clothes, and you wait there, watching, together. There is only the sound of his breathing, whistling through his bloody nose.

You taste blood in your nose, too.

Barney, he says, finally, dead-voiced, to someone above you that you can’t see. It’s not a question. He sounds like he turned a corner at work and here you are.

He knows you. Somebody in here does.

The worry and the freak-out and the dread and the years crack off you and crumble like dry mud. You nostril drips and your head’s lunar landing and you can feel the tissues across your jaw reach the limits of their smile.

“Gordon fucking Freeman,” you swear, and feel like static, and you laugh like you’re shaking, and you let him go.

You would have wrapped your arms around him. Because even though you know he isn’t the kind of guy who hugs—even though you know his body braces with its instinct that love is a form of violence—you have to bridge the crater of twenty years between you, you just have to, and he’ll just have to suck it up and suck it in and understand.

You would have. If he didn’t leap off that table and try to knock your shit in.

Before you can make heads-or-tails of it, Gordon’s flung out of shock and hurled his body upright, and it all happens so fast, God, he shouldn’t even be able to move that fast with his veins swollen on ketamine. Maybe the dream has made you slow and stupid, but one hundred and sixty pounds of physicist takes you off your feet and you’re stumbling—no—you’re falling backwards, head roaring with blood pressure, like you’ve been clipped by a train. Your neck is snapping forward. You’re getting the wind woofed out of you as your back collides with the far wall, purging your lungs. The table screeches away and clatters into the other wall, and you fumble behind you without thinking. Your thoughts splatter on the floor. His face is so fucking close you can see the busted canine in his mouth where all the blood’s come from; you can count his eyelashes; his fists are in your neckpiece and you grab his bony wrists with your naked hands as if Gordon was even capable of choking you.

But they don’t move. He holds you there against the wall, blinking and blinking, as if he can’t see anything at all and one more blink will clear this mist from his mind. 

_How much time_ , he croaks, his thin voice shot like a spring, and his whole face is trembling—not with tears and not with murder but with something else. Nose blood runs warmly down your face and you’re too frozen to sniff it back up. 

“Fuck, man—Jesus—I don’t—” He’s panting. You yammer. You could pitch your skull forward and clean his clock now if you wanted, but you don’t want. “Ten minutes, maybe—I just stuck you and—”

 _What year is it_ , he croaks, throat failing. He’s gulping air like a man who just sprinted a mile, and he’s scaring the shit out of you, and you don’t know what he wants from you, or have anything else to say.

You tell him, in your dream. He goes cold and his green eyes bleed dark.

The two of you are stuck there for a minute. You reach up and carefully detach him from your mesh gorget, uncurling finger-by-finger, and he just stands there and lets you do it, catching his breath and staring through you—the black doors, the corpses, the trainyard, everything. You take him by the elbows and walk him backwards and sit him back down on the table.

He tries to talk, but it doesn’t come out, and so you let him go and back away. He sits there alone on the steel. You both bleed in the quiet now.

His voice jars you back to the dream:

I just woke up.

You think you must have almost woken up, too, but you’re still here, and so you snort real hard and touch your face. It’s not broken—not bad, at least—but there’s brick-bright Barney Calhoun DNA all over your nails now, threatening to drop. Your prints have got to be fucking everywhere. You hurry to the sink to hoark the mouthful of blood and mucus out.

“I’m sorry about that,” you puff, but it doesn’t sound like the You you know. Your throat is a shattered pane of glass and you think you might be shaking like a shellshocked little Spitz. You sound like there’s vodka burning a hole in your stomach—like the ulcer’s under your tongue. You crank on the hot water and spit again and again. “I couldn’t risk keeping you in there. You blow my cover and we have both got a fucking brainworm, man.”

He doesn’t say anything. You wonder if he’s vanished. You hope so, maybe. You force yourself to turn around.

In your dream, he’s still there.

Gordon is taller than you by enough-and-a-half. That’s how you remember him: a too-long face and too-long white coat. But he looks tiny here in a way you’ve never seen, like a narrow bag of bones. Like a war refugee. Like an old Velveteen rabbit that’s gone through the wash and had its pink arms pulled to the point of snapping. Like some cowboy mercenary has just liberated him from a prison camp and slapped him with a carton of shitty apple juice and plunked him down in front of a shiny CNN reporter, all _how-do-you-like-that_. You know better than to try to cocoon him in another hug. You just wish you had a blanket or something to give him.

“It’ll wear off in a minute,” you promise, and unclip the CP thermos from its place at the back of your belt. Maybe he has been in a prison. His arms hang limply and he looks at something a thousand yards away. “Here, drink this. It’ll push it through your system.”

Gordon won’t look at you again, but he reaches out to take the canteen. You unscrew it and pass it over at the farthest reach of your arm.

The NC-MURF NON-COMBINE METROPOLICE UNIT REHYDRATION FLUID is nasty yellow bile that probably stings his bad tooth. He tilts it up too fast and floods himself out, choking, sending electrolytes streaming down his red chin scruff and over the front of his civvies. He doesn’t really seem to care.

“You don’t understand,” he says. “I just woke up. I just WOKE up.” 

Take it easy, you tell him.

“I can’t remember. It’s all gone,” he coughs, but he’s already going for another drink. “I don’t remember anything.”

You tell him he probably just had too much water. That Civil Protection dopes it. _Just breathe, man_ , you say—again and again and again—for what feels like the hundreth time, because he’s alive, and if he’s alive, then he needs to. You have to keep breathing, too. _Just relax,_ you tell him. You tell him _it’ll come back to you._

“You’re not fucking—”

He stops to calm himself down. He tries to, really. It terrifies you and unsettles you and makes you wish he’d go away and kind of breaks your heart.

“You’re not listening to me,” Gordon says as clearly as he can, language precise and prickling like it used to be, even though the dead mouth nerves make him slur. “It is GONE,” he says. “There is NOTHING there. I just woke up on a train. I just—I just saw you. This morning. On the—you were running,” he remembers. He’s trying to piece some kind of kaleidoscope horror together for you, stitch by stitch. So he’s not alone in whatever nightmare has got him in its jaws. So you understand. “You were late. I had the spectral analysis trial printouts and your vest wasn’t on right. I said you were fat. You weren’t—you were—you were young, you were—”

His voice cracks. For a minute, you’re batshit out of your mind with the fear he’s going to break down and cry. You can’t even dream that. You don’t want to consider what it means about the world if Gordon Freeman crumbles and sobs while you’re still standing up straight. You don’t know what you’d do.

But he doesn’t, and thank God, man. Thank anybody.

You grip his upper arms over the injection sites, thinking maybe a pinch will bring him back.

“Gordon! Gordon, look. Look at me”—you grab his chin to stop the back-and-forth twisting of his head—“I’m not a fucking Metrocop, hey? I’m undercover for the Resistance. I can’t prove it to you right now, but—fuck, just stop!” Your metal thumb digs into his cheek as he tries to turn against it, indenting the skin. You can move his face but you can’t manage to make eye contact. “Come on, man, you know me. I’m not a fucking slughead, Gordon.”

“I don’t know any of this,” he swears, so you let him go before you make it worse.

He doesn’t look into your eyes. But he does catch a glimpse of himself in the steel plate over your breastbone. It’s just a blur, maybe, but it sets something off in him, sharp and acrid like uncapping a flare. He hunches forward to see himself better and you don’t move a muscle—you’re wigging out, too—there’s a terrible wrong here, the seismic echo of an atrocity that has been done to him, one that’s never been done to anybody else, maybe, not ever in the history of history. But it’s just a darkle at the farthest edge of your brain. You can’t look directly at it. Just like he can’t look directly at you.

You stand there stock-still and watch Gordon touch his own face in the shitty mirror. He taps his broken tooth and winces. It’s fresh.

And you don’t even notice. Not really. Maybe you figure Hell just turns you brittle and dilutes your eyes and pours your insides out, fills them with gamma and rubbled test tubes and makes you look like shit in precisely the way he does. Even so, it’s pretty clear pretty quick you’re not looking at a fifty-something. But right then, in that dark room in your dream, you can’t imagine why Gordon Freeman shouldn’t look exactly the way you left him.

Twenty years later, your memory of Black Mesa is a crystal buried in the backyard. You could dig it up again if you wanted. If you exhumed it from the dark soil and squeezed it, it would still be just as clear and hard.

“I did it,” he remembers. “I pushed it into the Anti-Mass Spectrometer.”

“Oh, they fucking… they hit you or something, man.” He can’t see you at all anymore, but he’s right there; you take a hold of his head and tilt it downwards to look for a blister inside the greasy red hair. “Fucking slugheads. They must’ve cracked you with a—”

Gordon swats your hands away with too much violence. His fingers replace yours on his scalp, digging for a lesion. He doesn’t find an answer there, and his face screws up with physical pain, and he thumps back on the table. He squeezes his palm heels into his temples much too hard.

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

Gordon shakes his head—slow at first, then faster, like he’s bumping up against barbed-wire inside.

“Maybe it’ll help you. We’ll figure it out.”

But before you manage to figure out anything, Gordon’s shaking head drops forward, heavy as a cinderblock. Then he crashes it back into the solid wall.

The strangled quality of your voice seems to distract him, at least. It’s not a threat; you’re really asking: “Do I need to give you another shot of this?”

He rallies all he’s got to calm himself again, pulling back from the precipice of insanity. Gordon rests his skull against the cool eight-foot-thick cement and seriously considers it. “Maybe.”

You can’t handle this. It’s bigger than you. Than him, too.

He calms down again, and you guide him—inhaling, exhaling, exaggerating badly—until his breathing slows. You pick up the forgotten bottle and press it back into his hands.

“Finish the lime-aid shit, all right? I know it tastes like piss and grittle but it’s clean.”

Gordon has nothing else to do, so he chugs the rest like it will save his life. His arm goes dead with the empty canister.

He looks at you, finally.

You look back. Some of the wildness has left him now. He seems baffled, helpless. Like a child.

“I thought I was fucking dying,” you babble, if only to break the one-ton silence, except then you can’t seem to stop. And you know you sound as dumb as a raggedy old post, and you mean to laugh but you’re sweating up your armor like a sauna, and your giggle comes out all gauzy and breathless like a sob. “When I saw your face on that platform? Man, I—I thought you were dead.”

Gordon scrubs his face. His hands are shaking. He holds out the drained canteen, which you recap and clip on your belt, and then he bridges his longest fingers on either side of his nose. His voice is more of a mutter than a joke. “That makes two of us.”

“I still kinda think I might be dying,” you tell him.

He doesn’t really respond. Just drops his arms and holds the sides of the table he’s sitting on.

Once his breathing levels out, rough but no longer snare drums—once you don’t worry he’ll bust them rightaway, since prescription lenses strikes you as a goddamn herculean ask—you fish his glasses from your neckpiece. You unfold and hand them over, gently. His expression anchors itself on the dull black frames and he slides them on.

The crack perches over his left eye, bisecting brilliant green. He looks like he remembers what happened to it, but he won’t tell you.

You sit down next to him on the empty table.

Neither of you speak. Gordon doesn’t turn his chin, but doesn’t scoot away. Your boot heels dangle beside his flat-soled civvie shoes.

“Think I broke your nose,” he says.

“Yeah, well.” You snuffle experimentally. The cartilage burns but the blood inside is cooling down. “I shot you up with a hallucinogenic. We’ll call it a draw.”

He sounds sleepy now, like a guy waking up from a nap he never meant to take. “Where are we?”

“Still in the station, man. I’m telling you, you were only out for a couple of—”

“No. Geographically.”

“You mean really-for-real? Bulgaria. This is—was—downtown Sofia.”

“Before you found me. Where was I?”

“You were on the Sixteen inbound, the ee-twelve run. I’d bet my left ass cheek you got on in Bucharest this morning. Goddamn, Gordon, you were so—you were so close. All this time, maybe.” Your head starts to spin if you think about that, starts to whirl your brain like cabbage leaves, so you’d better not. “We can look at a map later. Right now, you think you can get up and walk? Just to see? We’ve got eighteen minutes before I need to move you.”

You cringe as if it’s a big ass imposition, asking him to walk—and after everything, it kind of is. Your nose stings as he slips off the table. Too confidently, you think; he laps the room step-by-step, and then he starts stretching his hamstrings like a marathon runner, like a freaking noodle in the morgue of STATION PROSPEKT, and you almost laugh again, because that right there—that specific strain of peculiar—is such a Classic Freeman, and this is such a stupid dream you can almost believe it.

“Right knee’s clicking. Shouldn’t be a problem,” he says. He lunges forward to test his weight and touches his broken tooth again. He looks at you and tells you, “Let’s go now. I don’t want to be here anymore.”

You can’t really argue with that.

You stand up. You douse the table and the counters and the floor with antiseptic. You put on your white mask.

You say walk with your head down, Gordon. You turn on the lights. You open the black Combine door.

You tell him not to tell anyone his name.

* * *

You will wake up from your dream soon.

You will open your eyes and sit up in your black officer’s apartment in your single bed with its cold sheets. You will put on your black gloves and your black boots and your black exoskeleton. You will comb your black hair and spit your flavorless toothpaste in the sink.

You will go to your job.

**WELCOME OFFICER  
PAVELKO, JOEL J.**

**THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE  
  
**

You won’t have a choice. When you’re awake, you have to serve.

You will beat the hell out of Wrenna Huỳnh. You will hit her in the mouth with your CP USP-MATCH and bust one of the little teeth right out of her head and onto the Platform 6-3 marble. You will kick her in the solar plexus so she can’t scream. You will put your boot toe into her ribs two, three, four, six times, until the resistance of your sole into her body disintegrates, until you can’t even feel your leg. Bently will pause on the other side of the chain-link and see you’ve got it handled and put her gun back in its holster and move on.

You’ll hurt Wrenna Huỳnh until she goes limp—until the personal point beyond which she can’t be hurt anymore. Then you’ll grab her by the scruff of her blue civvie coveralls and drag her down the hall with nose and mouth blood all down her front. You’ll toss her into the interrogation room like a dead dog in a sack. You’ll slam the heavy black door.

And then you’ll turn off the camera. You’ll tear off your mask.

You’ll let her lie there and puke bloody cereal on your floor with a pistol crack in her top lip, and you’ll tell her she’s the luckiest, stupidest son-of-a-bitch in this city. She won’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. She’ll think she’s about to die, so you’ll unbolt the storage closet and throw it open to where the single window pours in mild daylight. Then she’ll understand.

You’ll tell her where the nearest stop on the Underground is. Stay off the main streets, you’ll tell her. You’ll give her the weekly password. You’ll unclip your CP USP-MATCH—the same one you just broke her smile with—and, because you’re insane and there’s no coming back, you’ll drop the clip. You’ll squat down and reload it in front of her. You’ll tell her it’s sixteen shots and that’s all. It’s eighteen shots, you’ll blurt, but it’s sixteen, because she better save a couple for herself; there’s no way she won’t compromise your cover if they catch her. You will flick the safety and burrow its ice-cold muzzle right against the tender bump on the base of your skull to demonstrate. The brain stem, you’ll tell her. You’ve got to be sure you fry that thing. Best bet is to stick it in your mouth, you’ll say. You’ll say _you don’t want to know what they’ll do to you if you miss_.

You know. You won’t tell her.

You can’t wait for her to collect her bag of bones. You’ll jam the pistol into her hand and close her sticky fingers around it, then you’ll lift her under the arms like a baby and stand her up. You’ll boost her to the windowsill. It’s a bit of a drop, but it’s not like she’ll feel it. She’ll be too dazed to curse you or thank you.

You’ll leave her sitting there. You’ll go back inside. You’ll bolt the door.

You’ll step over the drippy trail of nose blood where you pulled her across the floor. You’ll leave it there so it looks like you had a corpse.

You’ll put on your white mask. You’ll turn on the camera. You will boot up the computer.

You’ll type:

**DAY 11 LUNAR 9 REVOLUTION 2023  
CIVIL PROTECTION METROPOLITAN ENFORCEMENT DATABASE  
C-17 CIVILIAN REGISTRY  
  
C3-633.9821.4547.12.72-C17  
HUYNH, WRENNA  
DOB: d03.l10.r1978   
HEIGHT: 157.48 cm  
RESIDENCY ID: NO DATA  
  
CIVILIAN UPDATE:  
DECEASED  
DOD: d11.l9.r2023**   
**CODE 507 CITATION COMPLICATION  
ISSUING OFFICER: MP 6166.20.3718-C17 PAVELKO  
REASON FOR CITATION: PUBLIC MALCOMPLIANCE**

You will update the record. You will wait for the ticker. You will breathe in, out.

**PRIVILEGE-POINT RECORDED  
NEW SCORE: 0317  
THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE**

For the hundredth time, you’ll stand up, and you’ll leave this bloody little room.

You’ll go pick the oyster crackers off the station floor.

* * *

In your dream, you leave STATION PROSPEKT together. One, two.

You don’t plan any fancy maneuvers. You just cuff him and walk out of there—right-together, left-together—single-file like you’re a short line of groomsmen. One, two.

You cross on foot into Sector E-Northwest. Gordon listens to you. He fixes his eyes at the twisty old Balkan streets of what used to be a real city, the last couple of nerves left after the Great Amputation. You hold him by the back of his neck and keep walking. God, knowing what you know now, you can’t imagine what those eight blocks must’ve been like for him. If you had known then, you’d have thought of something more comforting to whisper than _don’t freak out; don’t freak out; whatever you do, man, don’t freak out._

In your dream, the CS-CIs whistle like robins, and Breen in the sky says:

_Allow me, dear viewer, to address the anxieties underlying your concerns rather than try to answer every possible question you might have left unvoiced. First, let us consider the fact that—for the first time ever as a species—immortality is in our reach._

You hit the checkpoint barricade at the intersection of Ninth and the Water Reclamation District. You bump your chip once on the CP console to collapse the blue gate. Later, you’ll tell Civil Protection you were taking him for a medical intervention in the Psych Department when he gave you the slip. You’ll tell them you neglected to file the incident report before you left because your PriP is low and you wanted to cash in the anticitizen points for yourself. You’ll thank them when they bust your score to zero. You’ll tell them yes, given the peculiarities of your station, you understand The Consequences.

You’ve got Gordon Freeman. There’s a mole you never knew about on the back of his neck, where the ratty ponytail used to be. You’re not really worried about The Consequences right now.

You push him through the black shutter fence and you walk a little faster. One, two.

You turn a last corner into a derelict byway. When you’re out of the camera eye, your hackles rise, and your blood feels funny. Your mouth fills up with a bile taste. You don’t understand why, but you run.

You’re dip under a wire-cut chain-link fence. You skitter around an old dumpster. You look up.

There she is.

Alyx is waiting where she said she’d be. Kiddo looks worried—you’re nine whole minutes late, and there’s a big Vance wrinkle prematurely gouged between her brows. When she spots you, that groove deepens for an instant—fear and disdain, the way everybody looks at Metrocops.

Then recognition flashes. It’s got to be you under there. You’re jogging up the alley, holding Gordon by the scruff of his ugly jumper like a kitten as you go.

Your white mask complains:

**PRIVILEGE-POINT DEDUCTION  
NEW SCORE: 0303  
OFFICER OUTSIDE SHIFT PERAMETERS  
UPDATE STATUS IMMEDIATELY**

You don’t bother with your hand signal. Alyx slips her legs through the rails of the fire escape she’s perched on, corkscrews, and drops through to the cracked asphalt, landing heavily. You feel a little annoyed when you notice her shoes. Kid’s wrestled civvies over jeans and jacket—must’ve been carrying her disguise like a good spy—but she’s still got those damned hiking boots on, a pinch of eccentricity that threatens the whole outfit. She’s lucky her feet are so big. Those boots used to be yours.

“Shoes,” you grouse at her, first word out of your mouth. She bunches her nose.

“Hey, you didn’t tell me I’d be making railroad runs today. I told you it’s the extra weight; I hate lugging all that crap around. Those clodhoppers are like a kilo each—” Dark eyes brighten. She doesn’t know who he is, doesn’t recognize the busted glasses or the nub on his nose. Why would she? She just grins her megawatt grin. “Pleased to meet you, Doctor!”

“Charmed,” Gordon rasps, dejected, which is frankly amazing, and as the poor man stands there and shakes, you almost lose it again at how God-damned Gordonish he sounds. You unlatch his cuffs. He rubs his wrists like they’ve been in there longer than fifteen minutes.

“Don’t worry; the welcome wagon gets easier from here. Can you—”

You cut her off with a slice of your hand. You’re huffing and puffing and there’s no time.

Alyx blinks, and the friendliness is gone, gold stripped to hazel. She doesn’t look anything like you, and you’re glad; it was hard enough dragging a precocious teenybopper up and down the coast all through your thirties. It was hard enough teaching her how to brace herself for a shotgun blast and how to siphon gas and how to reel in a pike and how to detach a head-humper from your arm and how to deceive a cop. It was hard enough to remind yourself to stop pretending she was your kid.

Now that she’s grown, she doesn’t really look like Eli, either. She just looks like Alyx.

“You coming with?” she asks, but the anxious clench of her teeth means she already knows the answer. You’ve got to get back to your trains.

“Be careful,” you warn her. Gordon just blinks. One, two. You give him a nudge and the hand-off’s done before you manage to catch your breath.

She tosses you a thumbs-up.

You watch them descend into the sewer. Alyx says something to him you can’t make out, introduces herself. Gordon listens to you. He doesn’t tell her his name.

Once they’re on their way, you’ll pry a wood chip off a crate somebody tossed into the trash and jam it straight through the fat of your thigh. You’ll scream when you do it; you’ll probably puke your AFR lunch; you might pass out. You’ll tell Civil Protection you were shanked by your no-ID civilian. You’ll tell them you chased him down until you lost the trail and fainted cold. They’ll patch you up and interrogate you. That’s fine. You can empty your head and sink down in the black space and lie like nobody else.

You don’t stick around. You kick some dirt up over the water-print of her boot on the asphalt. You wander a ways until you reach a convincing place to collapse.

You find yourself a splinter. You line up and try a couple practice swings.

You take a deep breath and count your way to three.

_One, two._

* * *

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far-far away, Gordon Freeman stood with you under the big glass ceiling of Black Mesa Sector H Reception Area to count the stars. It was the dead of morning—a lousy three a.m. after some fancy company party, and he was all princessed up in his black tie, and you were clodhopping around in your chin-strap helmet. But it was summer, and it was drunk night, and you’d brought a six pack along because all the bars were closed up. You remember Gordo squinting up at the Big Dipper with a cheap beer in his hand. He wasn’t much of a talker. But sometimes—when it was just the two of you and Magnusson had pissed him off at work and he was in a peculiar mood—he’d unscrew his valve and unleash. The words would rush out like steam pressure, like he was buckling under the strain of biting a thousand thoughts back for too long. He’d just talk and talk and talk. He’d talk you to death. And you’d stand there beside him under the glass, and you’d drink and you’d listen.

That night, under Ursa Major, he told you this story:

_The first recorded flight in human history was in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina._

_You know this. Orville and Wilbur Wright launched a propeller-driven biplane off a steep incline, and it remained in the air for approximately twelve seconds, crossing one hundred and twenty feet. Maiden flight. Groundbreaking moment in the Machine Age, major human innovation. You know it. Everyone knows this._

_The first flight recorded in human history._

_Recorded history._

_You know what really happened in Kitty Hawk? Two degreeless bike-builders shoved a gas-guzzling Frankenstein off a dune cliff just hard enough that it caught a wind tunnel. It puttered less than half a baseball diamond, stalled, then plunged into the sand. Completely destroyed. Wham. They burned through an unrecorded number of prototypes before getting so much as a propeller off the ground. Then they hammered together a shitshow for the U.S. Army and entered the private market._

_Because it was the first flight recorded._

_Recorded._

_That’s the problem with innovation. Lambda. Science, physics, progress, all of it. It’s not the sum of what we do; it’s the sum of what we remember to write down. Nobody writes down the failed machines and dead engines. Nobody writes down the busted-up wings scattered in the sand or the pilots floating in the ocean. Nobody writes down what it cost._

_Everybody remembers Kitty Hawk._

* * *

**DAY 17 LUNAR 9 REVOLUTION 2023  
зона техники ELECTRIC RAIL STATION PROSPEKT  
OPTICON**

**SHIFT CODE: MP3C GOLD  
STATUS: SHIFT COMPLETE  
LOGGING OUT**

**GOODBYE OFFICER  
PAVELKO, JOEL J.**

**THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE**

When you’re awake, it’s easy to think too much. You try not to—not when you’re working STATION PROSPEKT. You’re too afraid a face you love will crackle in your brain stem and OVERWATCH will pull the coordinates through your eyes and into a computer screen.

But you think plenty, don’t you.

You think about your brothers a lot. You think about all the tastes you’ve forgotten: wild persimmons, peanut butter, Coca-Cola, toasted marshmallows. You think about the smell of the Black Sea as it only smells from the passenger side of an old German sedan. You think about sitting in that same sedan, driving that same crumbly old cliff road, a scoped rifle in your lap and six more outposts left on today’s recon to-do list. You think about how—as you lean out the window with your sniper, counting enemy drones over the lighthouse towers, breathing that salt water and hearing the gulls—you’re trying to remember a stupid Backstreet Boys song, just so you can teach at least one normal preteen girl thing to Alyx, who is all of twelve behind the wheel. You think about wishing you could take her out for ice cream after this. You think about the two of you swinging your legs out of the hatchback, watching the waves and kicking the sand off your boots, eating soft-serve vanilla and poking fun at whatever girl she likes, because you’re her uncle and you’ve just got to give her some shit. You think about big oak trees. You think about what it used to be like lying in the Chihuahuan Desert when there were still stars.

You think about yanking Wrenna Huỳnh off the chain-link fence.

Breencast will wrap up over the plaza as you leave work. The sun will sink and soupy clouds will part for a clear evening, but the Citadel glow ate up the night sky ages ago. He’ll say:

_“As we march onwards toward Progress, let us honor our roots only so that we may never return to them. Let us remember that we have scarcely begun to climb from the dark pit of our species' evolution. Let us not slide backward into oblivion just as we have finally begun to see the light.”_

It will take you five hours to get out of the Civil Protection medical station after you jam the spike into your thigh. They’ll yank the splinter and stuffed the fleshy hole with bitter-cold, colorless Combine bio-goop; they’ll give you a pocket of pills and in twenty minutes, you’ll be fit as a fiddle. An officer with a garbled vocoder and a stare like an icepick will hawk-eye you real good and ask a few questions, but fewer than you expect. Bently must have covered for you. You won’t know why she did that, or if it’s even true.

You’ll be on rest rotation now. You’ll unlock your motorbike. You’ll kick backwards out of officer parking and roll off the curb. You will go home.

The last glimpse of daylight will look bloody across these old bone-pale buildings as you pull up outside your apartment. You’ll head upstairs only for a second. You’ll open up your palm and yank out the microchip, wedge it in a wilted apple and chuck it into your blanket. You’ll drink a cup of rehydration fluid. You’ll pour some cold water over your healing thigh. You’ll turn off your lights and leave your false self there, sleeping, and you’ll jog down three flights to restart your bike.

Breen will wish you goodnight on the screens. He’ll smile like a saint above all the little people’s windows and say:

_“—sure you’re feeling fulfilled and ready to rest after another busy day under the wing of Our Benefactors. So, without further ado: Sleep well, City Seventeen. Pleasant dreams, and—as always—I look forward to seeing you first thing in the—”_

You’ll take off your white mask in the dark. You’ll keep your face on. You’ll drive.

Kelsey radioed you on the analogue yesterday to let you know Gordon checked in at Creek Base. They repaired an old airboat and sent him zipping over to Lab East. It seems cruel to make him run like a greyhound. He barely touched down at Doctor K’s before you were shooing him. Maybe he can’t sleep, either. It still feels cruel.

You’ll look up as you turn off the side-street and hit railway. A CS-C1 will wink blue and white like a comet. The sky will hum bright and charcoal-black.

You’ll flip on your headlight. You’ll take a deep breath before you hit tunnel and the sky goes out.

You try not to think too hard while you’re driving. Inside these tunnels, with the wind in your ears and the pressure at your throat, you’ll feel like you’re in the air. You’ll feel like you could go off the edge of a cliff and not know it. You hate enclosed spaces and if you over-focus on the brightness at the end of the tunnel—rushing at you like the bottom of an elevator shaft—you’ll have to pull over on the shoulder and shake and gasp with CP cars rushing by until you remember where and who you are.

But you’ll think a little too much tonight, won’t you. You can’t help it. You’ll think about Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. You’ll think about New Mexico and bad pizza and what you used to look like before the whole world went insane except for you.

You’ll think about Kitty Hawk.

You’ll speed up too fast to make up for the claustrophobia, and just like that, you’ll be free.

Creek Base is in a bombed-out quarter of the former Sanitation District, where the charred skeletons of office high-rises collapse on themselves, abandoned cars rust on a crumbling overpass, and the Resistance has holed up in a flood control station straddling Route Kanal. You’ll stop on the viaduct that bridges the sooty old creek, and you’ll listen to slow water. You’ll smack a mosquito on your cheek. You’ll hop off your motorbike and lay it down, wedging your front tire beside a decrepit old tour bus, just in case of a rogue CS-C1.

You’re here every few weeks. You swing by to drop off depot salvage and pick up info on the integrity of the Underground. You know the password.

You’ll slide down the rickety overpass ladder, favoring your injured leg. It’s all glued up, but it still hurts. You’ll walk the narrow cement curb to the old flow station, listening to the creek babble only inches away from your shiny black boots, and you’ll knock the right rhythm on the corroded green door.

The peep-hatch will slide open. It will slam shut.

The door will fling wide. You’ll be staring down a pump-action. Your heart will bump its head on the roof of your mouth.

“Olga! Are you nuts?” You’ll hear Kelsey’s bark before you can see anything but the muzzle hoisted at your chin. “Drop the fucking shotgun; that’s Barney.”

Olga will blink hard, wrinkle her nose, and seem to notice your face all at once. She’ll lower the weapon and tug sheepishly on her sock cap, then she’ll step aside to let you in. “Shit. My bad, chief. Jumpy.”

You won’t be mad. In the strange lit-up night, you couldn’t make out her face for a second, either. “Sorry about the outfit.”

You try not to get too attached to any of these Resistance guys. That’s asking for heartbreak; you’ve got enough people to love; and, in a way, you’re spying on the rebels, too. You don’t want a bunch of raving vigilantes digging your AnMat scientist out of their cubbyholes any more than OVERWATCH. But it’s hard. Everybody’s wearing their faces here.

You go inside.

When it’s dark, Creek Base runs on halogen lamps and strips of Christmas lights juiced by generators. They bounce off the putrid water and make everyone’s skin ripple. Voices ricochet off damp cement walls, disappearing down a black tunnel, and the smell of brook moss almost overpowers the stench of sodden trash.

Kelsey will clap-clap a hand on your shoulder to say hello. He doesn’t look like much of a rebel. He reminds you of your fourth grade social studies teacher. He’ll tell you Joan’s working hard on building a replacement airboat, but it won’t be ready for another week or so. He’ll tell you Septic Outpost sent a bunch of old-school Polaroids for you to riffle through in the locker room, stuff you’ll eventually need to haul to Lab East when you’ve got the time. He’ll offer to summarize, but you tell him nah, that’s OK, you’ll take a look for yourself. 

You wonder if you look like a rebel. You probably look like a cop. You hope you just look like a guy.

You’ll make your way deeper into the base. There’s just enough light to navigate the stacked supply crates and avoid spilling into the creek, which bisects this office from another sewer system. You try to keep out of the sewage routes. The Resistance sweeps its Railroad checkpoints every few days to torch barnacles off the walls and burn the dead crabs. You worry your presence there will just make things more dangerous. You worry, sometimes, that there’s a tracker or a bug you missed, plugged into your flesh in a place you can’t rip it out. You worry the Combine snuck in while you were sleeping and welded a chip inside your brain.

You worry you won’t save anyone.

You worry no one you know will make it out.

You worry that one day you’ll close your eyes and you’ll go to sleep and you’ll dream such an insane dream, you won’t be able to wake up anymore.

You worry the plane will plunge over the edge of the cliff and it won’t fly.

_In 1903,_ Gordon says in your head, too deep now for you to reach, sinking forever as stars dissolve around him in black salt water. You could have stopped him. You could have thrown your body on the propeller. _Orville and Wilbur Wright launched a powered biplane off a steep incline, and it remained in the air for approximately twelve seconds, changing the course of human life forever._

You’ll go through a door and there she is.

“It’s you,” you’ll blurt. You won’t mean to say anything; it just falls out of you, splats like raw eggs on the floor.

Wrenna Huỳnh will be there, though: propped on her knee in a dark Creek Base hallway, sawing apart a junky little fishing boat somebody dragged out of the sewer for scrap. Her left eye socket will be spongey red, and she’ll move gingerly, as if there’s still a print of your boot between her ribs—and there probably is. The string lights somebody wrapped around all these ceiling pipes will barely delineate her black hair from the rest of the world.

“It’s MP Sixty-One Sixty-Six Twenty Thirty-Seven Eighteen Pavelko,” she’ll say, and frown, and stand up to dust her hands on her civvies. She won’t be startled like you are. She’ll regard you like she figured you were coming, like you interrupted her work, and you suppose you did. “Is this where we start singing _It’s a_ _Small World After All_?”

Your numbers will startle you. “How’d—”

“I memorized your serial,” she’ll answer. The sound of guttering water is everywhere down here—that and the dull _tink-tink_ of moths charging the halogen lamps. Wrenna Huỳnh will cross her arms like she’s cold, but she’s not. The Christmas lights make her eyes look shrewd and purplish. “I knew you weren’t going to find anything on some shitty rail station computer. I just wanted to peep your log-in for some leverage. Friendly advice? You should probably stand about six inches to the left when you pull up readouts in front of a detainee.”

“Whoa-ho, OK. You want a job?”

“No thanks, officer. I’m pretty Protect-and-Served out.”

“You can just call me—”

“Calhoun. I asked.”

“For leverage?”

Her brows will hop with grim mischief. You know how that feels, too. “Never know.”

“You can call me Barney,” you’ll finish. “Sorry for the beatdown. Thanks for not blowing my cover.”

“Hey, what’s a fractured cheekbone between anticitizens.” She’ll manage a wry grin, but it’s not funny, and Wrenna Huỳnh flinches as if it hurts. The cleft you dealt her upper lip will have scabbed by then. It’s ugly, and you’ve probably given her another scar, but before you can beat yourself up about it, those string lights will flicker, and the broken smile will disappear.

“Thanks for not shooting me in the brain stem,” she’ll add. “You want your gun back?”

“Nah, keep it.”

Wrenna Huỳnh, done with you, will about-face to drag off some bothersome scrap. You’ll offer to help and start in before she answers. She’ll look thinly at you—like she’d been about to refuse, like you’re bugging her—but accepts. The two of you will lift and awkwardly carry a big slab of cut tin to the end of the corridor and turn right.

“When’d you make it in?” you’ll ask. She’ll kick the storage room door open with her shoe and maneuver around a weird angle. She will seem to have trouble looking directly at you, and you can’t blame her. You have trouble looking right at you, too.

“Yesterday—not too long before your science guy. Kelsey said he’s some kind of big quantum physics MacArthur Genius or something. I tried to chat him up. He’s… not an easy man to like.”

“Yeah, he gets that a lot.”

“Is he always so catty?”

“I don’t really know,” you’ll tell her, an honesty that will startle you. Maybe you feel bad for knocking her tooth out. Maybe you think niceness will wipe the name SHANNON BLUM out of your brain. Or maybe it’s just the truth. “He used to be. It’s been a minute.”

“I know the feeling.”

The Creek Base storage room is dark and dusty and full of miscellaneous crap just waiting to ruin someone’s day. You will help her wedge the tin behind a shelf of lightbulbs in all shapes and sizes, and then you’ll both get the hell out of there before you catch tetanus from a stray roll of barbed wire. She will shut the door behind you and make a beeline back to her dismantled boat.

The footage locker’s in the opposite direction, but you’ll follow her back up the dim hall with its sour holiday light. Maybe you feel like you’ve got to talk to Wrenna Huỳnh—just a little. Maybe you’re sheepish on the guilty aftertaste of kicking her ass. Maybe she just looks so different when she’s not hanging on that fence, you don’t know what else to do but follow, hoping you’ll wind up somewhere else, too.

“How long you been looking?” you’ll ask, because you’re not cruel enough to ask how long he’s been gone.

“Fifteen days. OVERWATCH put me on a Highway Seventeen Elevated before I got to you. I don’t remember much—they had me in some kind of cubicle or something. But it was right on the coast. I could hear the waves crashing.”

“I know the place. That’s an underwater graveyard. You’re lucky you left through the front door and not a garbage chute.”

Wrenna Huỳnh walks faster than you, even after being tarred on 6-3, but she’ll stop in her tracks to slingshot that word right back. “Lucky, huh?”

“Sorry.” Your stomach will sink fast and you’ll grimace. The boat on the floor will look to you in that moment like the corpse of a deer lying beside a country road, stripped by coyotes who run lightly from field to field in the night, so nobody will ever know who they are or how to chase them down. “I’m an asshole.”

“No, you’re right. I guess I am. I lucked my way into a transfer ticket, lucked out of a train raid, lucked right into the one fake Metrocop in City Seventeen, so… sure. I’m lucky.” She’ll look up from the canoe to grin her busted grin. “Lucky feels a bit shit, if I can be honest with you.”

“Yeah, I know the feeling.”

You should probably leave her alone. She’ll look like she wishes you would. But you’ve got to ask one thing more, because maybe it will make you less insane: “Where are you headed from here? Going to try to slog it to White Forest with the next convoy?”

“My husband’s not at White Forest, so no.”

“Maybe they put him on a different train. Could be OVERWATCH sent him back to City Sixteen, and you’d never be the—”

“I don’t think so.”

“Did they give you some kind of—”

Wrenna Huỳnh will close her eyes. Maybe she won’t want to tell you anything. The creek is always chilly this time of year, and it’ll still be dark outside, but the sun will inch closer to rising in a way nobody can ignore.

“The last time I saw him—he was calm. Like he’d be right back,” she’ll say, and just like that, Wrenna Huỳnh is a million miles away, over three hundred kilometers of rail and fifteen days, boarding a black train in the numbered city that used to be Bucharest. Like Shannon Blum’s face is burned into her eyelids. Like she could have stopped him, too. “I keep thinking he was waiting for me to come up with an argument, or a handful of papers or a card or—you know. To say something that would save him. But maybe he really thought he would be right back. Maybe he just couldn’t imagine anything else.”

You’ll wonder if the first pilot two seconds from going over that Kitty Hawk cliff in a propeller plane thought about the stars or the sand.

“It’s weird talking to you,” Wrenna Huỳnh will say. She’ll look at you askance out of the corner of her bruised eye. “You’re like a person.”

“Yeah. Freaky.”

The wince hits her quick. “I, um. Didn’t mean it like that.”

“Ah, it’s okay.”

“No, it’s not,” she’ll insist. Nobody has any manners anymore—not really—but you don’t need an apology from someone you threw to the marble and kicked until she puked. Even so, she’ll shut her eyes and breathe out. “I’m the asshole.”

You won’t know what to say to that. Maybe it’s time for you to go.

She’ll look right at you. It’ll disturb you, a little—rattle the shingles up your spine. You kind of wish nobody would look directly at you anymore.

“I did it,” she’ll tell you. Her eyes are as dark as the eye of a pistol and they won’t flinch. Her voice won’t even catch in her throat. She’ll tell you all of this sternly, neutrally, like it’s a list of boring facts and it’s been boiling under her tongue: “OVERWATCH pulled him because of a discrepancy on our relocation ticket. He didn’t have anything to do with it; I didn’t even tell him. I had an old college friend at the C-16 Housing Department, so I called in and asked her to swap out one serial. Shit, I don’t even know what happened to Caroline,” she’ll wheeze. “Maybe she didn’t do it, or she ratted me out, or CP got her. It was just a single digit. Just to get us a nicer place. So it would feel a little more like before, you know? We were yuppies. We had a fucking townhouse on Staten Island. This was the difference between a waterside with a kitchen and a—” She’ll shiver. For a second—just a second, that’s all—you’ll feel so horrified you just want to forget about Gordon and hop back on your bike and run away.

“It was his name on the coupon,” she’ll tell you, and there’s nowhere for either of you to run, anyway, except over a cliff and into the sea. “There’s my sad story. There’s luck for you.”

You will take a hard suck of air. You will wish you were anywhere else.

“I hope you find him,” you’ll say, even though you know she won’t. “I really do.”

Wrenna Huỳnh will mutter _yeah_ , and she’ll squat back down to her boat, switching on the circle saw. You’ll step carefully past her and follow the string of Christmas lights.

“Hey, Barney,” she’ll call you—not back, but still. So you’ll turn to see what she wants, glancing overshoulder, and you almost expect to see her there on 6-3, clinging to the chain-link with a backpack and a ponytail. But she’s not there anymore, and you’re not, either. You’ll both stand here by the rotten creek, waiting for the sun to come up.

“You’ve got a kind face,” she’ll say, except this time, she’s not looking for anyone. “Better keep your mask on.”

You won’t manage the smile. Not quite. You’ll wave, a little, and you’ll go home.

Your trains are safe. They don’t fly.

* * *

You’ll remember:

One thousand or twenty years ago, on a lousy summer night, you worked security on a black-tie party for the Mesa eggheads. While you stood invisibly by the door and watched gussied-up pencil-necks murmur over their butterfly shrimp and baked Alaska, Dr. Breen sparkled at a podium in his white TV preacher suit. He gave a speech about the Future. He talked in big capital letters: Innovation, Imperative, Intellectuals. He said every man and woman in this room is an Inventor standing at the precipice of Progress. He said _we are here perched on the horizon of a thousand discoveries that will alter the course of mankind forever_. He said we are all Orville and Wilbur Wright.

After, when you caught up with Gordon under the glass ceiling—the both of you looking haggard and weird under starglow but in different ways—he told you about Kitty Hawk.

 _Breen’s not a scientist,_ Gordon said, hilarious in horn-rims and sports jacket, flinching as he cracked the can and held out his arm to let it foam. _Not anymore. Politician—he’s blowing smoke. That thing you say: He’s pouring us a tall glass of shit. If anyone’s the Wright brothers here, it’s Lambda. Black Mesa is a propeller plane. We,_ he said, snapped off the tab, and let the beer bubble over his hand _, are just the pilots._

 _All of us,_ he said, and he tucked the broken ring of metal into his coat pocket like something precious—or maybe just like trash to save until he could throw it away— _are being told to sink or fly._

* * *

Breen doesn’t wear white anymore. His life is full of black now, too.

He lights up the dark screen and he says:

_In order to be true to our Nature—and our Destiny—we must aspire to greater things. We have outgrown our cradle. It is futile to cry for mother's milk when our true sustenance awaits us among the stars._

In your dream, you make it to Lab East in the middle of the night. Your stupid Combine jet-ski jalopy threatens to sink under you, but the dam is open now, the water smells of moonlight and cold clay, and even in these Outskirts, the lights of the city are still bright enough to see.

Mossman is the only egghead awake when you arrive. She sleepily runs the decontamination scanner on you, punches something into her computer, and then she lets you waltz right in. When you decline a bed—you’ve taken two caffeine pills, and you’re so fucking insane now, you can’t imagine sleeping—she pours you a cup of her hot cider instead. The kitchens are deserted at this hour of morning, but the instant coffee machine still spits hot water, even though nobody has coffee anymore.

You haven’t slept in a while by this point in your dream. It doesn’t really faze you. When you want to go to bed, you take a CP-issued Benzodiazepine to counteract the AFR ANTI-FATIGUE RATIONS. You don’t know what you’re going to do if you ever have to go back to sleeping the old-fashioned way.

But Dr. Freeman’s sleeping.

That’s what Mossman tells you, anyway. She fills a mug and stirs in the shitty package of cider mix. The spoon clinks loudly in all this quiet. She calls you Barney; you call her Mossman. _He’s had a very trying day_ , she tells you. She asks you to let him sleep a while longer.

You don’t really care for Dr. Mossman. There’s something starchy and off about her you just can’t put your finger on. But that night—when she urges you to let Gordon rest—you stand in the empty cafeteria together, dead silent, and you don’t mind Judith’s company. You drink your powdered apple sugar and breathe in the steam.

In your dream, Gordon sleeps until you wake him up.

It feels like all you do is wake Gordon up. He is curled on an awful mattress like some exhausted old hound dog, sheltering in whatever broom closet Eli let him turn into his sad little dorm. He’s still wearing that ridiculous HEV boondoggle Doctor K rigged up for Alyx. You wonder if he’s even taken it off once. Gordon’s lucky her feet are so big, too.

He doesn’t headbutt you this time. He opens his eyes and sits up, gob-smacked for a moment as his brain recalibrates, blinking hard. He grabs for the glasses laid neatly beside him. He breathes hard out his nose, tempered and shaken, and then he thinks for an instant before checking his knees and standing up.

Gordon doesn’t want any cider, even though you brought him some. So you drink his, too, lukewarm and too sweet, as he buckles on the pistols Kelsey gave him. You leave your goofy mug on the file cabinet, next to the bowl he’s been using as a place to brush his teeth.

He doesn’t even say hello. That’s all right, though. You’re not sure you feel like _hello_ anymore, either.

In silence, Gordon follows you outside into the first wince of daylight, wet and orange over the cattails and the murky lake.

You find a spot along the dock that’s not too exposed and you sit down, right on the cool cement, cross-legged like kids. You’ve already dropped off the Septic Outpost recordings, but you pull the shitty paper map of the Underground you drew him out of your pocket. You flatten the page out between you, and you explain all your pencil lines and your wobbly shapes, and you talk.

He listens. He doesn’t have much to explain to you. Not like Before.

Even now, Dr. Breen’s up in the tippy-top of the tower, getting powdered for his show.

_They have thrown a switch and exorcised our demons in a single stroke. They have given us the strength we never could have summoned to overcome compulsion. They have given us purpose. They have turned our eyes toward the stars._

Gordon doesn’t know you anymore, and that makes you kind of sad. Oh, he’s fucked out of his mind on the smell of alien brains and firecrackers like everyone else in the world, sure, but under all that noise, there’s a guy who feels mostly the same as the one you lost twenty years ago. Your old friend still exists. His is long gone. Sort of funny how that worked out.

But it’s not really, is it.

You’re older than him now. In the cellular sense, but in the worldly one, too. It’s fucking weird. You tell him so. You kick your legs over the side of the dock, letting your boots dangle and letting the sun rise ever-so-slowly. You answer his very practical questions when he asks. You unclip your binoculars to watch for CS-C1s as a couple lab guards—Izel and Kimmy—ready a grumbling gas-guzzler for their dawn patrol and you say _this is so weird, man, it’s so fucking weird._

Gordon, holding your ugly map on his lap, pulls his glasses off. He lifts them in the barely-there sunlight and squints at the crack. “Understatement.”

“Yeah, sorry. It’s got to be worse for you.”

The canal has swollen with early autumn rain. It laps too near, and it smells like bellied-up cod and gasoline, and you try not to think about gators. You try not to think about pieces of plane and progress and people, floating in the sea.

“But just between you and me, I wouldn’t mind misplacing the last twenty years,” you tell him, incidentally. You watch a skinny swamp rat hop up on the dock and scoot down to a big pile of driftwood, looking for something to eat. “You didn’t miss anything good.”

Gordon’s still fussing with that broken lens. But he shoots you a sharp look, like there’s a speck of that razor glass in his eye. “I missed everything.”

“Sure, but it was bad.”

“I could have helped.”

“I don’t know, man.”

He sounds a little mad—angry-mad, mostly, but insane-mad, too. He puts his glasses back on without fixing them.

“I would have helped. I’m a scientist,” Gordon insists, and turns that prickly green eye away from you, his body language harsher and his throat tighter. “This is my purview. This is why the sciences exist. To spearhead the human response in catastrophic times. That’s how it’s worked for five thousand years. That’s how it’s working now. I would have done something—gathered data. It would have helped.”

You should probably feel scolded, but the language spills out of him, and you know it’s not about you, is it. You know he needs to believe this. You can’t stop yourself from sounding, in some kind of far-off way, a little sad. “I’m sure you would have.”

You feel bad for him. Gordon’s been gone an age, so you’ve had two decades to reckon with the _never coming back_ thing. He just woke up to find out you don’t exist anymore. That’s worse than being dead, you think. If you’d the decency to croak in a proper sense, then you’d be in the past, a fixed point in memory burning across lightyears like a star. Now you’re a memory and the present all at once. You’re a fucked-up Barney and not-Barney. You’re the damn zombie physics cat. You’re alive but you’re not.

For a while, you’re not sure if he’ll like you anymore. You wouldn’t exactly blame him.

“But we didn’t do too bad, hey? Considering,” you try, patting the binoculars around your neck. Gordon frowns back at his map, but that acid look just bores right through. “We got new labs, new science projects. That suit you’re wearing. I got a new job.”

“You shouldn’t have.”

You think it’s a joke, and so you do your best to grin, but you can’t; it’s not funny; you can’t make this oil taste in your mouth go down. “Well, gee, doc; I had to keep myself busy somehow.”

“They shouldn’t have made you,” he adds—corrects himself—and you suddenly understand the _they_ he’s talking about. You see Kleiner’s door-stopper glasses and you hear Eli’s chuckle and you feel real shaken for a second. And you feel, just for a second, all of twenty-three years old. Like there’s a dorky chin strap digging into the flesh of your throat and making you look fat. Like there’s a migraine pain behind your eye. Like there’s cup of coffee in your hand and it’s as black as the desert sky.

“They didn’t have the right to ask you to do anything like this. It’s wrong,” Gordon swears. “It wasn’t your responsibility. We were intellectuals of national preeminence. You were just a young man. Now you’re—”

He cuts himself off. The map you drew crinkles in his fist. You recognize the frustration rolling off him, and you think of Alyx behind the wheel before she turned fourteen, and you have to look away.

“Different,” he says, and not in a good way, but he doesn’t add anything else. Just: “I could have helped.”

Gordon squints at nothing. He seems guilty. Like even if he couldn’t have dreamed up some science fiction to save all of these people, maybe he could have protected a few. Maybe he could have protected you.

You’re afraid to ask. But you think maybe you understand how he feels.

Alyx is here, too. She’ll wake up before too long, but you don’t hassle her, because she’s younger than you and needs more sleep. Whenever you catch her passed out in Doctor K’s comfy chair, snoring under an itchy blanket, it rubber-bands you back in time, too.

Sometimes you daydream about it. You dream you’re back in Omsk, and you’re twenty-five years old, and you’ve been on the lam with Kleiner and Eli and Rosenberg for three years straight, living off the floor in shitty abandoned apartments. You’re just a baby spy, smuggling canned artichokes and amoxicillin and bits of intel back home for the more important people. And you’re paranoid—worse than now, because back then, you barely knew what the fuck you were doing. And one day, you pick up a stray piece of conversation between these government scientists that makes your overtaxed brain think they’re feeding coordinates to Breen. And you don’t say diddly-squat. You panic and grab Alyx—five at the time and racked with a fever—and you run, hopping on a cargo car to Novosibirsk with the rough clothes on your back and an old Soviet pistol and a lumpy bag of dried apricots that happened to be in your rucksack. And it’s getting cold, and there’s no heat, which means you zip the baby up inside your winter coat like a kangaroo so she doesn’t freeze in her sleep, and forty-five minutes in, you figure this is going to be your life now: jumping on trains with this little girl.

Those old men chased you for two weeks before they caught and cornered you in a barn by the Kazak border. Kleiner talked you down and out of your bad dream, and—when you reached down into that dark cellar and pulled Alyx into the daylight, wailing and covered in fifty-year old spiderwebs—Eli hit you so hard to the mouth, you blacked out.

He was lucky, you think. If—at any point on all those spy training road-trips you took Alyx on across the years—you decided you’d had enough of being _low-priority humans_ and split, they wouldn’t have caught you again.

“You’d be one of the old eggheads, too, if you’d stuck around,” you offer up, because that’s what you’re best at, right after being a slippery bastard: You lighten the mood. “I believe that’s layman’s terms for _fucking weird_.”

You wonder if you’re supposed to feel grown. You don’t—you feel like a young man, like they just transplanted you here into this organized apocalypse, and you’re making it all up. You feel like you’re twenty-three with a twenty-four-year-old daughter and all these old men who depend on you. You feel like you’re waiting for your voice to get deeper and your hands to stop shaking. You feel like you’ve missed your shot and your mean-as-piss dad was right and you’re never going to become anything. You feel like you’re still just a kid and you don’t know real from fake.

You wonder if that’s because of how the world collapsed, or if it’s just the way it goes.

Gordon scoffs at the _layman_ word. “Your imagination’s shit. Academia’s a crater,” he says, and he’s not wrong. “Drop ‘layman’ and make up a degree. Claim Caltech. Caltech’s an idiot factory. I’d believe you were Caltech cum laude.”

“Hi-larious. You still think you’re funny, I see.”

“Eli’s using pasta strainers to hold test tubes. The only thing I’m thinking about is where the fuck to apply for some grant money.”

You reach down over the concrete curb to sink your fingers into cold packed sand and pull up a fistful. And you toss it all over his front, spackling the map and making him jump inside the HEV armor. He grimaces as he dusts it off, and you don’t even laugh—sometimes Gordon just has to be messed with, like flicking the foot of a pissy old cat you adore.

He wipes his lenses with a finger, needlessly, and brushes the last of the sand off his arm. It puts people off, sometimes—his attitude and his random silence—and maybe you should’ve felt distressed to say something in moments like these, but you never have. You don’t mind the quiet.

But you know he’ll leave soon.

You will, too. You don’t like to dick around Lab East too long; you need to check back in with Creek Base; but if he leaves now, maybe it’ll be another twenty years before you find him again.

“Now that you’re not dead anymore. You know one thing I’ve been kicking myself over ever since?” You don’t need to specify _since what_. “Bugs the heck out of me. All that nonsense I used to spew at you—aliens and telekinesis and whatever—I never even once told you,” you tell him, even though he’s still poking at that map, as if he might trace it with his eyes until he hotwires missing time and stolen memories across the dark matter geography of his brain. You watch him sitting there to memorize your work and you frown, and you wish like hell it had all been different, somehow.

But it’s not, is it.

“I never even once told you how goddamn chuffed I was you listened to me, at all. I mean, no offense,” you say, by-the-way, “but I was just some dumb kid. You didn’t have to give me the time of day. I was real proud, too.”

Gordon serves you up an outright aggressive _tch_. His upper lip twitches and his eyes roll; it’s disdain, but it’s something else, too, something that makes you feel like you could knock him off and into the water, if you weren’t so sure he’d disintegrate.

You drop your binoculars on your lap and scowl at him. And maybe you’re a little too sharp, but sometimes that’s how people have to be; everyone’s been anesthetized by shockwaves and chemicals; the only way out for the aggression is love.

“Fuck yes I was, Gordon,” you snap, and glare him right down, until that pissy look slinks off his face. “You were one of the smartest guys in that circus. The world, probably. And you weren’t a fucking prick about it. You know what—I get so mad thinking about all the brilliant shit you would have done if Lambda didn’t throw that rock at you. You were supposed to change the future. Particle colliders and warp speed and whatever. You were going to make things better. Not like this,” you swear, and you pick up the binoculars again, because even when you’re glaring, you still have to see. “Why the hell wouldn’t I be proud of you? Still am.”

He says it thinly, bluntly. Like it’s the obvious—and it is. “I blew up the world.”

“Maybe you did, man. Maybe you did.”

Gordon doesn’t say anything else—just sits there, glumly fiddling with the sand that didn’t come off.

“But you came back. You’re going to fix it,” you tell him. You stand up. You lift the glass to your face and look away from the sun.

Someday soon, you’ll figure out how to say _I could have stopped you_. But not right now. Right now, you’ll say: I know you are.

Now that you’re awake, you say. Now that you’re here.

* * *

You thank God you’re not a slughead. You’d be a good one.

The Resistance calls them _manhacks_. Civil Protection calls them CM-VISCERATOR DRONES, but they’re manhacks, all right. It’s a messy machine and wobbles through the air, seeking heat like a toddler, until it sputters its evil little last. You hold a live one in your hands and defuse it as part of Metropolice training, since the motor’s weak and raw and lacks a brain smart enough to tell humans apart.

They’re junky shitshows. Civvies fish dead CM-Vs out of the creek all the time for scrap; a Louisville slugger or a well-placed pipe wrench will blast one apart, send the blades clattering and smash the headlight. But there’s something about the sound. There’s something about the whirring sharp edges and the fleshy _thunk_ of the rotator sticking in a big raw human bone, the scratching and sparking against concrete walls. Precision isn’t the point. Terror is. You don’t know terror until you blow the roof off a rebel tunnel and drop a swarm of manhacks in.

You know a thing or two about terror. You know what it feels like to know no one’s ever coming back.

**DAY 19 LUNAR 11 REVOLUTION 2023  
  
WELCOME OFFICER  
PAVELKO, JOEL J.  
  
**

You’ll be awake when the uprising begins. Civil Protection issues the CODE 404 AAP in early evening, as the November sun bronzes the concrete tops of brutal old Soviet buildings. You’ll launch out of your chair in the OPTICON and all the screens are blood red with the words:

**ALERT CODE 404  
  
SOCIAL FRACTURE IN PROGRESS  
THIS IS NOT A DRILL  
  
MALIGNANT OUTBREAK 10-20 NORTH TWO  
MALIGNANT OUTBREAK 10-20 CENTRAL EAST  
MALIGNANT OUTBREAK 10-20 SOUTH SEVEN  
MALIGNANT OUTBREAK 10-20 SOUTH SIX  
  
LETHAL DETONATION IN 10-20 SOUTH FOUR  
CM-VISCERATORS DEPLOYED  
  
ALL OFFICERS TAKE IMMEDIATE ANTICITIZEN STERILIZATION ACTION  
ASSEMBLE-ADMINISTER-PACIFY  
CLAMP-CONTAIN CITYWIDE  
  
ALERT CODE 404**

For a moment, you will forget you’ve gone insane. You’ll think you’re dreaming again.

The broadcast from the Citadel will awaken you. Its siren is an intermittent wail, bubbling the Instinct back into your bloodstream, igniting City Seventeen like a black thunderhead. An AIRWATCH fleet of CS-C1s will buzz over the empty Nova Prospekt Rail and towards the plaza. You won’t hear the first blast, but there’s another now, closer, still too far away for you to guess at, and no one gave you any warning, not Kelsey or Olga or Joan, and you’ll think _oh, my God, they’ve done it now, those sons-of-bitches._ You’ll hear the hunter-choppers screaming in the direction of the fire. You’ll swear you smell smoke like it’s up inside your brain.

For a moment, you’ll forget everything. You’ll stand there in your white mask and wait for the elevator to fall and the planes to drop out of the sky.

Then you’ll remember: SHANNON BLUM.

You will slam back down into your black CP chair. You’ll pull your scrambler key—the one Alyx made you in case of emergency. You will uncap the cylinder and jam the wire proboscis into the OPTICON mainframe, frying everything; you’ll cook the intersection controls so inbound traffic can’t switch lines for OVERWATCH reinforcements; you’ll overload every damned camera eye in the place; and you’ll melt, if only at this terminal, any invisible walls you can. The fields drop around the armory downstairs and the outbound rails open unfixably and the unabridged RAZOR registries are, for a moment in time, accessible to anyone who knows where to look.

You will override OVERWATCH detainment records and crack open the lists and look up SHANNON BLUM.

**  
C3-633.9821.4547.12.71-C16  
BLUM, SHANNON  
  
DECEASED  
  
**

The white masks will hammer on your door.

You won’t know what you’re thinking. Maybe you’re in shock, or maybe you’re losing your spy game after all these years, or maybe you just can’t imagine yourself surviving this. Maybe you can’t see any farther than the edge of this cliff.

You’ll answer.

The MP will jump on your ass right away. Everyone will be losing their minds now, not just you, and now a gun is pointed at your eye. He—she—you—what does this shit matter now—what did it ever matter, really—will back you the fuck up, order you down on your knees, scream _you’re with the fucking Resistance_. And your crude override tool will be popping and dripping in the OPTICON computer, sparking like hell and bleeding smoke, and bile will rise in your throat, sour and human, and you won’t even think up a lie, not this time. And you’ll lace your hands behind your head, right over the stem. And no one’s seen Alyx or Gordon or Eli in weeks. And you keep radioing for them into nowhere, even though no one will pick up. Doctor K says there’s no proof they dematerialized, that the Combine teleporter could’ve flung them anywhere on Earth, but you don’t know if he’s just saying that so you don’t fall apart on him. And maybe you will fall apart, and you’re scared to find out, so you keep speaking that little girl’s codename into the wavelength—you echo FUNNYBIRD COME BACK COME BACK COME BACK—but she doesn’t—and you know you can’t afford to think this way because there’s still so much you’ve got to do and people you need to keep alive but my God, after all that hope and now all this dead air, you’re not even sure you care what happens to your brain anymore.

And then comes the _pop_.

You’ll wait for maybe a half-second to die—to keel over in your black armor and spill your head all over STATION PROSPEKT OPTICON, under the chair where you’ve burned up the last six years of your life—before it occurs to you there’s no bullet.

You’ll unclench your face. You will find the Metrocop crumpled on the tile, leaking through his filter.

You’ll find MP Bently in the door.

She’ll stand there with her USP-MATCH. She’ll lower the pistol just enough to tear at the pressure release under her chin and grapple her faceplate and shove it up, off.

He’s just a little guy, Bently. His skin is young and his eyes are puffy and his face is brown under the white mask. He’s just a kid.

He’ll look at you, terrified, and he’ll shout, raw voice uncoded and cracking like he’s about to cry, “Are you really Resistance?”

You’ll be so struck dumb, waiting for your brain to frizzle, that you won’t think to say _yes_. The fingers will unlock from the back of your neck and you’ll drop your mask, too—for the last time, maybe. It clatters on the floor between your knees and, carefully, you’ll stand.

“What’s your name, man?”

“Did you let that lady go,” Bently will warble, looking like he’s going to ralph, but the Citadel siren’s still whining over City Seventeen and the gun’s still there in his hand. “That lady on 6-3?”

“Yeah,” you’ll rasp. “I did. She got away.”

Relief will suck the heat from his face; he’ll mop his brow with his knuckles. “Oh, my God.”

“You know her?”

“No, I just—she didn’t have anywhere to go—she was waiting for her husband, so I let her sleep in the cafeteria, and—”

You’ll take the opportunity. While Bently babbles his guts out about Wrenna Huỳnh, you’ll close the distance, steering his USP-MATCH the rest of the way down. You’ll say, “Come on, kid, what’s your name?”

He will look right past you, leaden eyes fixed on the dead cop he put down a couple feet away. Head blood spreads quickly, and it’ll roll real slow toward your bootheels like strawberry syrup, like a fat red rattlesnake, and Bently’s not all there; you’ve seen each other’s bare faces and now he’s forgotten all about MP Pavelko. You’ll smell that cop blood and you’ll think about Grandma Rose dumping out a can of wobbly beet jelly at Thanksgiving. You’ll think about the animals you’ve killed. You’ll think about your daddy’s fingertips after he slapped you too hard and too fast in the nose. You’ll think about your favorite brother, Joel, passed out cold on his bathroom tile in a puddle of glossy red—and you’re fifteen—you’re a little guy, just a kid—and the person you love most in the world is dead, you know it. For two beats of your heart, you know he’s gone now and he’s never-ever-ever coming back for you—until you realize he’s just puked cranberry spritzer all over the floor.

You’ll snap your eyes up, too.

Bently won’t remember his name right now. His pupils are hooked on the corpse. He knows his numbers, that’s all: “MP twenty-nine oh-eight nineteen eleven oh-two—”

You’ll square his shoulders in your hands, breaking his trance. “What do your friends call you? You got any friends?” He’ll shake his head. You gently clap his chin with your cupped glove. “What’s your mama call you?”

“Todd.”

“Todd? Todd Bently—that’s you?”

He’ll nod, but he’s still trying to look at the body, so you’ll give him another pat. You’ll look at Todd Bently’s big ripe baby cheek under your spit-shined thumb, and he’s young enough to scare you—must have been the last crop of children conceived before the Suppression Field went up. You’ll try to imagine what it might be like to have never known the world Before, but you can’t.

You’ll put down your hand. And even though you’ve only ever been a little brother, you’ll try to remember how Joel used to squeeze your shoulders whenever you cried.

“OK, man. OK, Todd. I’m Barney. We’ll get out of this, OK?” you’ll promise, and you’ll squeeze and squeeze, because everybody needs a bullshit promise sometimes.

Today, Breen won’t be on any of the screens. A soulless voice, artificially female, will punctuate the crisp autumn air, issuing OVERWATCH alert codes one after the next, but you won’t listen. You already have a voice in your head:

_In 2003, Dr. Gordon Freeman changed human life forever._

It’s a bad dream outside. The streets will be total fucking pandemonium—under an orange rind of sun, muzzle flash will light up the plaza, popping like kettle corn. Civil Protection officers will openly fire on everyone; OVERWATCH will openly fire on everyone; they’ll fire on each other, too. Panicked custodial workers will zig-zag across the alleyways, looking like bunnies, tearing off their yellow vests. Some will make it; some won’t. Civilians unlucky enough to be downtown when the uprising started will hit the pavement left and right, limbs splayed in all sorts of unnatural positions. Somebody with a smart ass and a World Series arm will have hurled a big, meaty brick right through Administrator Breen’s broadcast screen, shattering it. Handfuls of chickenshit Metrocops will flee the scene.

You and Todd will steal an APC ARMORED PERSONNEL CARRIER. You’ll tap your subdermal microchip on the garage console and then you’ll rip that horrorshow little fucker out of your body, leaving a raw papercut behind. You’ll bite your own hand heel when the glue won’t give, tasting fresh blood. You’ll have to help Todd with his. You’ll pinch both bugs between your naked fingers and you’ll throw them to the floor.

You’ll crush them with your shiny black boot, and MP Pavelko dies.

Nobody will stop you. You’ll drive out and into the plaza and through the lead popcorn and you’re gone.

The wreckage will worsen as you head east toward Creek Base. You’ll plow through deserted blockades cobbled together out of anything. And you’ll rumble by more and more bodies, strewn haphazardly: an OVERWATCH sergeant fleshily missing the top of his head; a charred diorama of MPs caught by a homebrewed explosive; a spray of civvies mowed down by rifle fire as they tried making a break. You’ll stomp the pedal about as hard as you dare while taking corners in this black metal rhino, and every once in a while, you’ll pick up some live people on the way, too. Todd’ll scream _STOP_ ; you’ll drop the back hatch so they can hop in. A guy stumbling around with tear-gassed eyes. An old lady struggling with a huge sack of rice. A young couple toting around two big-ass OVERWATCH pulse rifles they’ve scavenged off dead cops and got no notion how to use. You’ll run into another rogue MP, even, cautiously picking her way up an alley with a handful of block raid survivors cowering behind her. She’s Roksana, she’ll tell you. She won’t give you her serial. She’ll see Todd’s face and, inexplicably, know it’s time to lower her gun.

An airship will howl overhead, animal and mineral, plant and machine. It will fly too high to see you, too high to care.

Dr. Breen stood in Black Mesa under the dark desert sky of the world Before and said:  
 _  
And so, from the bottom of my heart—to the Inventors, to the Innovators, to the Intellectuals—to the Creators and the Overthinkers—to the Insatiables—to the stars:_  
  
 **THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE**

Hell’s arrived at the hideout. Your heart will plunge, but you won’t be surprised.

By the time your hijacked APC bounces up to the fight, nudging ancient sedans out of the way and crunching over the skeletons of dead motorbikes, Civil Protection’s already whipped up a cute little offensive barricade on the overpass. They’ve collapsed Creek Base with a hunter-chopper missile to flush out the guerillas; chopper didn’t even stick around. Everybody left alive will’ve sloshed through the sludge water, clawed their way up the concrete channel and into the street, then crammed into a ring of cement-and-cinderblock apartments.

You’ll look down. Guys you sort-of-knew will be floating in the sewage alongside vodka bottles and dismembered tires and bobbing bullet casings.

You’ll look up. Civvies with no shooting experience will peek out the high-rise windows, trying to defend the disintegrating buildings. The minced glass will look like jagged teeth. A CP mortar blasts a fire escape clean off, and for a second, you see human shadows inside scatter away like fish.

You’ll look straight-on. There’s the Protection squad: they’ll be sitting pretty right in the middle of Kanal Street, hunkered behind OVERWATCH’s pop-up riot trenches with a sniper and two bazookas, hammering the shit out of the poor rebels. Dusk creeps in with the last red sunlight, with the white plaster powder in the air.

The police lieutenant will think you’re backup. For a couple seconds, anyway.

And you’re not in this for revenge, you tell yourself; you’re really not. But in that last moment after you rev the engine—right before you bulldoze their checkpoint and pulverize their white masks into fucking skid marks—you’ll hear the exact instant of realization. The CP robo-voice will pepper into your radio, and even through the vocoder, you can hear he’s scared:

  
**TWO FORTY-THREE AT MY POSITION MP OFFICER IS ROGUE REPEAT  
OFFICER IS MALIGNANT**

And when he disappears under the grill—one good thump and _alakazam_ , gone—you’ll wake up for the first time in six years.

You don’t worry about afterlife. You’re not a churchy man. But seeing that fat helmet-head crack and snap under your stolen vehicle will take you just about as close to God as you’ve ever been.

You’ll be shot so stupid with joy, all you can do is drive straight. One of those black riot barricades will bounce over your windshield into the air, whirling ass-over-ankles; the next three Metrocops ripped under your wheels won’t so much as bump. You’ll hit the brakes, dragging oily red tracks behind you, and then you’ll wheel backwards and run over them again, pancaking a crawling MP whom your first hit just crushed at the hips. The APC’s oversized tires will lurch to a halt in the smear of bodies. You’ll watch the remaining slugheads ditch their posts and run for somewhere dark to hide.

 _Light ‘em, kid_ , you’ll screech; or you think you do; you won’t even know, really, you’re so out of goddamn marbles. Todd will sit pretty above you at the mounted machine gun, and before you can finish your thought, he’ll crumple the rest of the CP team like used tissue paper.

You’ll hear the high splattering beep and then the long flatline over your radio as each white mask drops out of the world:

**OVERWA—  
** **OFFICER ROGUE OFFICER ROG—  
** **ELEVEN NINETY—  
** **MP NEEDS HELP—  
** **PRIORITY TWO ANTICITIZEN AT MY LOCATION CODE BROKEN ARROW BROKEN ARROW ASSEMBLE-CLAMP-CON—**

You won’t even know you’re screaming until you run out of breath. You’ll cough for another lungful of air as black armor tears apart one-by-one all over the street. And you’ll be fucking ecstatic. And you’ll be the happiest you can ever remember being in your life. And you’ll be so fried on AFR powder; you’ve just whuffed double the recommended dose; your eyes will be two gaping potholes and your heart will migrate to your head. And you’ll be so giddy-high at this point—so inured to the human mess you’ve caused—that when the last slughead slaps down on his front with a back full of bullets, you’ll burst into giggles. You’ll grab Todd’s boot ankle and shake his whole leg like you’re somebody’s little brother again.

It will be quiet now. Your radio will run as clear as a cold stream at night.

Roksana will jump out first. She’ll heft her wicked rifle overhead—you’re all bizarrely vulnerable in your CP getup—and she’ll holler _FRIENDLY FRIENDLY, HOLD YOUR FIRE_. You and Todd will follow suit, waving your arms like idiots to keep Olga from blowing you apart as you drop the hatch and release your rescued civvies. They’ll run over cracked blacktop and shattered glass to the blown-out first floor.

The three of you will stay behind just long enough to scoop weapons off the street and torch the APC so Civil Protection can’t reclaim it. Then you’ll sprint into what’s left of the Resistance, too.

When you get inside, they’ll tell you Kelsey’s dead. They’ll tell you Joan’s been incinerated. They’ll tell you Sasha and Maxine caught the edge of a grenade. You’ll shout to lift everybody who can’t walk and haul them to the lower floors—AIRWATCH will be on the way, and you’ll hear the hunter-chopper wings miles off. They’ll do what you say.

They’ll tell you nobody’s heard from Alyx, no.

They won’t tell you that Wrenna Huỳnh took a manhack to the arm during the retreat, but you’ll find her yourself. She’ll be sitting on the floor with her back scrunched tight against some grandma’s dust-covered sofa, huffing and puffing, staining yellow canvas with her blood. The broken-off blade will be throb there in her triceps; before you can even think to help her, she’ll knock it out. It will clatter to the bare floorboards in a bright red splatter.

You’ll drop to your knees as Olga runs over a bandage and a bottle of vodka. A shot-up rafter will lose its gumption and whack the kitchen tile with a big wooden bang.

Wrenna will turn as pale as a phantom. You’ll grab her shoulders in your hands despite the blood—despite the bullet holes in the walls and the crunched VISCERATOR on the floor—and you’ll hold her still until she looks right into your eye.

And you’ll know her ears are ringing. And you’ll know she doesn’t want to talk to you on a good day, and this ain’t a good day, and maybe there’ll never be another one. But the name SHANNON BLUM is torching up your throat and if you do one more thing before you die, God damn it—

“I found him,” you’ll rasp.

And she’ll know what that means.

“I found him,” you’ll say again. She’ll hear you, but you won’t get up off your knees or let her go. You’ll think about malignancies—cells expanding ad infinitum, spreading through the bloodstream, that can change your future forever. “I found his file.”

You don’t need to say anything else.

She’s known he was never coming back. She’s known since Shannon stepped off that black train in the middle of nowhere. But this kind of knowing is the difference between dreaming and being awake; it’s the gauzy space between _never_ and _never-ever-ever_ ; it’s the murder of _what-if_ ; it’s the sudden understanding that, even if you dropped the haze of light-noise, maybe the stars aren’t there anymore.

Wrenna Huỳnh will look like you do, you suppose.

She’ll go quiet as a home crumbling after siege. She’ll look executed. She’ll run between your fingers like sand. But she won’t say a word about it. Never-ever-ever, you’ll figure, again.

“Help me,” she’ll grunt, and jerk her shoulder from your grip, and she’ll slap her bare hand on your chest until you grab it instead. It’s still attached. You’ll grab it hard.

She says help me get back up.

* * *

In your dream, Gordon finds you.

Dr. Kleiner couldn’t believe you found him. You didn’t, you said. Eli couldn’t wrap his mind around it, either—couldn’t calculate the probability. _Almost inconceivable_ was the term. But you don’t have the mental problems doctors do. You know some things without needing numbers; you know the world now grows and shrinks faster than their math.

And you know what it’s like to never-ever be found. Even in the bowels of your dreams.

Even after your dreams, when Breen isn’t on a television or a podium anymore, and there’s no one left to talk in capitals, you can hear him. Even when there is no one left to stand at the tippy-top of a black tower that cuts the sky in two with light and say:

_Instinct was our mother when we were an infant species. Instinct coddled us and kept us safe in those hardscrabble years when we hardened our sticks and cooked our first meals above a meager fire and startled at the shadows that leapt upon the cavern's walls. But inseparable from Instinct is its dark twin—_

Even when there is no one left to wear white in the desert and say:

_—and Innovation will alter the course of mankind forever._

Gordon finds you again in the waking world, too. Your dream is over and the bombs are falling everywhere, full of napalm and nails, and gunships whine in the sky. You were trying to salvage some antiseptic out of a rubbled clinic when a sniper lineup hit your squad and fragmented you. You’re not sure how many days you spent stuck on the third floor of that blasted-open parking garage, eating up your NC-FESC NON-COMBINE FIELD ENGAGEMENT STIMULANT CAPSULE pills. You closed your eyes in intervals of fifteen minutes, knowing that even if you couldn’t see them, the monsters were still there.

You thought you were dreaming again when he showed up. There was a sizzling dynamite _boom_ and white smoke everywhere. And then somebody was reaching out of the smoke for your arm.

Big black horn-rims, with a crack in the glass.

You thought you overdosed. You thought you were hallucinating your past—not the real one, but the way you wish it had gone—you wished Gordon was here to pry you out of the wreckage of Black Mesa, out of the elevator shaft, and you’d never have to do any of it, would you.

You can’t believe he found you.

After fifty-some hours of .50 caliber attrition, you don’t have the presence of mind to ask how. He’s got Roksana and Lyle with him; they mortar fire the snipers to kingdom come and scrape you off the cold ground. Gordon thinks he’s going to have to carry you out of that garage—or that somebody else will have to carry you, more likely—you can tell by the worried look on his face. But you don’t faint until you hear the rain gutter rattle, see a soldier sliding down, and watch Alyx’s boots hit the cement.

 _Catch him,_ she shrieks, and the second she turns to you, her face starts to dissolve into white pinpricks of light. _Gordon, catch him, he’s going to—_

Maybe you just fall asleep.

Breen’s not on-air anymore. But when the gunfire stops long enough, your ears start to ring in the silence, and you can hear his voice in the back of your mind, over the hiss of those trains:  
 _  
You have chosen,  
or been chosen_

It was hell getting everyone to Kleiner’s. You lost eight people on the way. You lose more in the two hours it takes to return with your rucksack of looted meds: Viktor, Samiat. Roksana boosts herself onto a park fence and absorbs a bullet to the throat. You wake up in a snarl of blankets on Doctor K’s lab tile as Alyx is trying to scrape a crust of blood off your chin.

You snatch her by the shirt and smash her to your chest and, for the next fifteen minutes and in front of everybody, you blubber like a baby on the floor. You are so happy to see her, you forget she was gone.

_I have been proud to call  
City Seventeen my home_

You guess you’re Rebel Leader now. You probably shouldn’t be, but everybody just started following you like you know what to do. Olga’s tweaking on stolen AFR and can’t think straight. Lyle won’t stop rattling off old movie scripts. Todd follows you around so close it’s embarrassing; he eats when you eat, paces when you pace; you keep bumping into the kid and having to scoot him out of the way. You peeled him off the first couple times you caught him teddybearing your arm in his sleep, but you just let him do it now. His cheek slides down your shoulder until it plops in the crook of your elbow. You let everybody’s crazy chips fall where they may.

You’ve been living like this for two weeks. Everybody’s hungry and smells awful. Lyle clicks his heels like Dorothy and says _there’s no place like home,_ _there’s no place like home._

You’ll have to push to the Citadel soon. For now, you’re just collecting stray people, waiting for Gordon to tell you it’s time.

Another few days pass since he pulled you out of hospital parking. It feels like years and seconds. Alyx scores a crate of civvie mealbags on one of her scouting ventures—“beef stew”—but there’s hardly any nutritional value in those tasteless shits. Most of you are eating synthetic crackers and trapped rodent. Poor Doctor K’s rationing his leftover Humalog and is getting the shakes. Everybody’s cold and sniffling. Worse: you still can’t find any hydrogen peroxide for Wrenna.

She was there, too. At the hospital, in the white smoke. You remember seeing her face next to Gordon’s all of a sudden while everybody was standing outside the ruins, jiggling you awake.

You tried to get a look at her manhacked arm the other day—just to see if it was healing. But she yanked away from you so hard, the scab broke, and the old bandages couldn’t hold, and she started bleeding into her coveralls. You just caught a whiff of the smell.

 _“Gangrene,”_ you told her, like you know. Like there’s ever been a _doctor_ in front of your name. Like there’s anything she or you can do about it.

Wrenna shrugged off your furrowed look, busy fussing over Kleiner’s workshop table with a flathead and a tube of super glue, doing surgery on a flashlight. Sick blood eked out with every flex of her arm, pimpling her sleeve, turning the cheap blue dye purple. Right after that first attack—when you abandoned the remains of Creek Base—Olga laid a bunch of duct tape directly over her fresh wound. You knew it was a crap idea, but her blood was caked all over the carpet; what else could you do?

 _“Yeah,”_ she agreed, but she didn’t stop working. _“Probably. It’s going septic, at least.”_

_“There’s got to be some alcohol, or—maybe we could boil the bandage—?”_

_“Don’t worry about it,”_ she said.

Wrenna’s insanity is the kind that pulls her—and, by extension, you—together. She’s graduated from the baby pistol to a submachine and scrounged a vest from a CP, tucking her ponytail into a knit cap. She’s into double-digit water runs and knows how to rewire lights. Her dark eyes are dead and unshakeable, and the grief of uncertainty has obliterated her fear. But you side-eye her as she rolls that stiff arm; you notice her sweating at night, the glow of your security monitors turning her skin blue; and in the early morning, when you’re both supposed to be sleeping, you can hear her get up and wander the halls.

You watched her fiddle with the screwdriver a little longer, until the screw gave up and the glass lens came off in her hand. _“I do worry about it,”_ you said.

_“Well, there’s your problem. Worry about Freeman.”_

_“I got plenty of worrying to go around,_ ” you told her. _“I am a professional. I can worry about him, I can worry about Vance, I can worry about food, I can worry about—”_

She said who gives a shit about me.

_on your way to  
parts unknown  
  
_

Today, you look for her as soon as you wake up, like always, but she’s out in the hall with Yusuf now, dicing up rats where no one will have to look at guts. You look for Alyx; she’s sitting on a cork table, swinging her legs, chatting with Jesenia and Todd. You look for Kleiner, who’s poking a slice of watermelon into Lamarr’s crate. You look for Gordon, too.

He’s hurt himself. Gordon said it was a loose handful of piping in a basement, but you know he’s lying; he came home this morning with a big hunk of skin hanging over his eyebrow and so much blood in that eye, no amount of glass could help him see. You know exactly what did it. You’ve seen that wound ten hundred times. Somebody slammed a stun baton into his head. Breen must want Dr. Freeman alive.

You felt like screaming at him when you saw it. You don’t understand how he’d let himself within kidnapping range of a slughead. You don’t understand why he’s out there, at all—you ordered him to hunker down, but he doesn’t listen to you, and what can you do?

Now he sits on Doctor K’s sink and pulls hair out of the cut. You go to see if he needs help, and he does—his arms are too tired to tape up the loose skin, to do small mechanical things for himself—so you squeeze into the tiny bathroom and you push his eyebrow back into position with your thumbs.

It looks bad. The edges have dried nastily, the bruise sweats, and the socket’s probably broken. You peel a remnant of scabbed tape off his upper eyelid and blood freckles up.

“Jesus, Gordon.”

Gordon’s eyes look younger and wearier without the glasses. He sucks air hard through his nose, wrinkles the whole bridge, and white-knuckles the lip of the sink so as not to bat your hand away. “Don’t be a wimp,” he informs you, grimly.

“Really? You could lose your eye.”

“Key word: could.”

The gash bubbles out pus. OVERWATCH shut off the water on Day Three, so you pour some from a boiled bottle. It washes pink down the side of his face. He dabs clean with a hand towel, scattering little pink droplets across the cracked old porcelain. The medicine mirror behind him is corroded to shit, silver peeling back, but it still reminds you of what houses used to look like Before.

“Lucky physics,” Gordon snorts, bunching the ruined cloth in his fingers. “If I believed in that sort of thing.”

You can’t help it; you crack the joke. “Physics?”

“Luck. Physics, until further notice, still checks out.”

“Sounds like magical thinking to me, pal.”

He needs stitches; the tape ain’t cutting it. You squat down as best you can with Gordon’s bulky suit poking every which way in here and rummage under the cabinet for the sewing kit. He must guess what you’re up to, because when you emerge, there’s a resigned look on his face. You remove his glasses from the sink bowl in case of accidental squashing and tuck them in your collar.

Doctor K did this for you once, years ago, after you took the butt of a rifle. You still wear the scar on your cheek. You’re sure Gordon will keep this one, too. You wish you had some surgical thread. You wish you’d been able to stitch up Wrenna’s arm before it soured. You haven’t bumped into a real medical doctor in almost a year, and none of the medics have made it this far.

Gordon’s first flinch hits hard. He doesn’t squeal, but his bare fists flex hard as you tug the fishing line through, and on the second stitch, a blunt noise of pain escapes.

You pull the skin taut after the third suture and let him rest for a minute, shaking out your wrist until it stops trembling. You’ve gulped more caffeine pills in the past three hundred hours than you’d normally take in a month; Gordon’s winded like he just galloped up a flight of stairs. You tap the needle clean and watch him with apologetic eyes.

“It wasn’t worth the risk, man.”

“I owed you one. A couple, if we’re splitting hairs.”

“I really wish you wouldn’t fucking do this shit. I keep begging you to stay put”—you try not to shout, but your throat tightens and you can feel the air on your teeth—“but you won’t hear it. Don’t know why I fuckin’ bother at this point.”

“Bothered to save your ass, anyway.”

“Man, shut the fuck up, would you?” You give the needle one last shake and trap the clear line between your fingers to rethread it. “Going to have me stabbing your eyeball.”

The next two go a little easier. You press the heel of your free hand into his forehead to keep him still, and each time Gordon sucks air, you instinctively exhale, as though if you don’t remind him, he’ll forget how to breathe. He’s sallow as a smear of pavement chalk by the fifth; you try to stop a roll of sweat from his hairline before it hits the exposed tissue, but you fail. It must hurt too bad to make a difference now.

“Don’t do this shit again,” you warn him, real low and serious this time, so nobody else can overhear how much you mean it. You yank the last stitch, and you snap the line with your teeth, and you knot it as close to his brow as you can. You leave the excess cord dangling for him to deal with. You look at him steady and stern and not at all who you used to be, because the World After’s changed you in a way that can’t be changed back, no matter how many people you find.

“Nobody else matters,” you swear. He feels around for his glasses, but they’re not where he left them. You tap the frames once on his knuckles and then hold them out of reach as you make him try to understand. “Nobody. Not if it comes down to it. Not me, not Olga, none of us,” you tell him. You tell him _you’re going to save us_.

“Stop,” he says—he sounds sick, and you’re nothing but a dark blur to him, and it’s not a request. You don’t.

“I am grateful. But next time, do the calculus, buddy. Somebody else can run ammo; you’re Priority One, comprende? You don’t owe anybody shit.”

“I owe everyone”—he slices the air with his hands—“everything.”

“Quit, man. Just shut up. You didn’t do this.”

“Yes, I did. I did it. No one else was in the fucking test chamber. There is no conceivable shred of doubt about the fact that I did it.”

“You didn’t kill anybody.”

“I killed everybody.”

“None of that matters now,” you tell him, but it’s a lie, isn’t it. You’re good at lying. Nobody suspects you. But you can’t look into the busted eye of the man that fucked up reality and convince him to live. You can’t tell him his grief is selfish and short-sighted. You can’t reach into wavelengths and produce empirical evidence—you can’t do the science—that would prove to him the world is better off with him in it again. All you can do is say, “We can’t afford to lose your mind.”

You’re so caught up in in the _need-to_ s and the _no-choice_ s—so addicted to the numbers—you don’t even notice. Gordon sits there on the sink, seeping from his eye and bleeding two shades yellower, looking every second more and more like he’s going to pass out. But you’re too busy doing the survival math. You don’t notice what you standing here is doing to him until he snaps around, all of a sudden, and starts puking his guts in the broken toilet, fishing line still stuck there on his face.

You can’t really save him, can you.

You forget what you were saying. You hit your knees, too, but there’s no ponytail or shirt to hold back. So you just tell him you looked for him. You swear you did. As he retches up twenty missing years of guilt, you tell him you looked up-and-down and everywhere for him. You tell him you jumped through layers of glass and radiation and bodies in Black Mesa, looking for a body with dorky frames and red hair as the whole world first started to slide down these rails to collapse. You tell him you looked even though you knew you’d never-ever find anything—not a name tag, not a severed leg, not a gravestone, not a corpse in a Civil Protection morgue with half its face dissolved by acid because you didn’t get to him in time. You tell him your list of unaccounted for AnMat _Dr. PhDs_ whittles down and curls into a molten glow like cotton tinder. Like Black Mesa. Like you.

No, you don’t tell him that. You just tell him you looked for him, and he was nowhere. Not a name on a redacted file. Not a ghost.

It takes Gordon a while to catch his breath. There’s next-to-nothing on his stomach—just fear and bile—but even with cramps wrecking him, he manages, somehow, to look relieved.

He chokes it out like it’s been down there forever, like a pilot’s bones buried in the sand. “I didn’t kill you, at least.”

“No, man,” you tell him. You hand back his glasses. And your arm around his shoulder can’t stop him—but you leave it there, all the same. “No way, brother. I’m still here.”

_It’s safer here._

You go out the next day together—you and Alyx and Gordon. It’s not smart, but it’s the way it happens, and three blocks out of the hideout, you catch a CP scout motoring by with a big red cross taped across his back. You can’t believe it. You hit his front tire with a OSIPR burst. You yank him off the totaled bike, kick it away, and brain him good. His backpack slouches open all across the street.

It’s loaded with penicillin.

_Welcome! Welcome to City Seventeen—_

You don’t sleep until you cut the dead flesh out of Wrenna’s arm. You give her the last half-jug of shitty moonshine to dull the pain, and you boil the sharpest pen knife you’ve got, and when the blade shines under the slatted dawn light and her eyes swim with booze, you sit her cross-legged under the boarded-up window, and you carve her to pieces.

She’s as much of a trooper as you can be about something like this. You clear an inch of rot away with short curls of your wrist. Wrenna bites a mouthful of balled cloth to bits before she drops into drunk-shock. Then she sits there with her sick arm in your hand and sweats bullets while you wipe tissue off the stainless steel. She stares like death as tears slick her face.

“I could have saved him,” she tells you. Her lips are cracked and she’s on the thousand-yard-gaze now, too, just like a caribou covered in wolves. You dig the last of the necrosis away and toss your knife aside.

“Not how that works, and you know it.”

The ceftriaxone powder Alyx pulled off the CP runner dilutes fast in a syringe and you tap it a few times before injecting close to the humerus. She twitches, but that’s it.

“I could have said something”—and you know she’s just hamboned with the grief and the guilt, soaking in fever and alcohol; and there’s nothing you can say to make it even a tiny bit better; but you’re human, and you’ve still got to try—“I could have let them take me instead. Then he’d be getting his gangrene hacked off.”

“Then you’d both be dead.”

“Maybe I should be. Maybe I am.”

You grope for some levity. It’s all you have, most days.

“Well,” you try to chirrup, but your throat cracks. Her scraped flesh just sits there plain-as-day in the washrag beside you, and even though you pack that gaping wound with as much goopy Combine ointment as you’ve got, you don’t know if it’s going to save shit. You squeeze the ragged edges together between your hands as much as you can and wait for it to dry. “If I’m sitting here slicing chunks out of a zombie, that doesn’t bode too well for my life expectancy, neither.”

Her voice is as flat as sand bombed into glass. But her dark eyes turn to look at you, still seeping, and the edge of her mouth twitches, just a little, like an old reflex that hasn’t been lost to the flood. “Maybe you’re dead, too.”

Sometimes, if you want to save somebody’s life, you’ve got to hurt them a little. You have to tell them the exact thing they don’t want to hear. You’ve got to shake them enough to get them to bother whether or not they die. You’ve got to wake them up from the dream.

You know that’s the basic elements of living. You just wish it didn’t so often have to be you.

“I could have stopped it,” she says.

You cup your hand right behind her neck, right over the brainstem. You feel the blood, full of memories, flutter under your fingers. You think of falling. You think of the sky dissolving into the Black Sea. You think of Gordon’s back in a lab coat walking down a white hall.

You’re still alive, you tell her. And I am, too.

* * *

In this new world, in the brick city that used to be Sofia, under the dusty sun of the month that used to be December, you have this one last dream.

Gordon stands in an empty artery of Black Mesa in a black tie and an old aviator cap, just outside test lab door, and he tells you about flight:

 _“If we worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true really is true,”_ said Oliver Wright, on the precipice of throwing a switch and changing everything. _“Then there would be little hope for advance.”_

He tells you about two brothers who turned the World Before into the World After. You don’t tell him you pretend he’s your brother. You don’t tell him you wish you had a storky build and a math brain and red hair. You don’t tell him you imagine, sometimes, he’s been there for everything, all-along, your whole life, just so you have a right to feel so proud of him.

And in your dream—just like in your real life, as it once was—just before he steps through a door and crashes the whole world—Gordon tells you all about the failures of Innovators. He tells you about ambition and gods and life and death. He tells you about the unwritten science. But instead of listening, you’re looking through the glass ceiling and counting a million-billion stars. You imagine your brother Gordon riding a solar wind in a propeller plane, a wink of light in an indefinite black space. And there you are—back on land, waving, knowing the engine could fail but praying with all of your heart it doesn’t—watching him change the rest of forever before he falls.

Maybe you could have stopped him. But maybe everybody dreams about his brother with a fistful of stars.

* * *

You push to the Citadel at night. You see by the light of the tower and the fires.

Breen is back on the overheads. His face is gone; it’s just a voice now; and no matter how much he pretends, he’s still just a human, too.

_“Did the lungfish refuse to breathe air? Would we model ourselves on the trilobite? Are all the accomplishments of humanity fated to be nothing more than a layer of broken plastic shards thinly strewn across a fossil bed, sandwiched between the Burgess shale and an eon's worth of mud?”_

You think maybe he’s scared.

Maybe you were scared once, too. But that was an unimaginably long time ago. Right now, all you can think about is getting back to your trains.

Everyone who can stand is here, hunkered down in the bombed-out remains of Victory Square, huddled under an overpass as the first snowflakes drift down through cinder-smog, sprinkling the concrete.

Two sunrises ago, you told the civvies to hunker down with Kleiner until he gets the teleporter running or until you come back alive or until somebody else boots up the rails. You gave them all of the food and all of the gas. You asked everybody with no family left to pick up a rifle and follow you towards the center.

Two mornings ago, you broke out of the lab. Alyx leads one team and you lead the other. _A-Team and B-Team_ , she joked, but you can’t laugh anymore. You sent Gordon with her, because you’re sure she’s got the best shot at making it out—or she’ll make it farther than you will, at least. It’s not science; it’s just the way these things are supposed to work.

Two evenings ago, you lost half the fireteam in three gristly blocks between East Seventh and Breen Street. You picked up more soldiers on the way. None of you are real soldiers. You dug in as best you could.

Two nights ago, when your team surged into the square, knocking a strider’s legs out under a hail of hopper drops and mortar shells, you ran into Gordon. He told you A-Team was scattered. He told you Alyx rushed ahead and he lost her. He told you to push a clear path to the base of the black monolith and he would find a way up and find a way in. You pushed. He went. This time—small mercy—he didn’t turn to say goodbye.

That was two hours ago. You’ve burnt out your fight and your little army now. The square is quiet, and the dust is settling, and a fresh layer of frost blankets killed bodies and killed war-machines like sea foam. Downed striders lie in horrible spider-leg wrecks, their angles frightfully delicate, orange skin freckled by snowflakes. Some of them take a while to die, and you hear their sad whistle-song as night falls, and City Seventeen’s sort-of-darkness spreads across the ruthless buildings and the toppled Victory Statue.

You stack your human dead there, right in the center of Breen Street beside the bronze rider. You look at the cracked neck of that rearing horse, at the beheaded soldier atop it, and you think maybe you won’t see Alyx ever again. But maybe you won’t see anybody else ever again.

There’s not much in the way of shelter out here in the Administrative District. You can’t fall back; there’s too many wounded, and the old orchestra hall’s collapsing, and you’ll never take this much ground again. So you squat. You hack the decorative aspens into firewood and drag trash barrels under the overpass for burn pits. Those who can walk scrape brittle snow into repurposed MP masks to boil for drinking water and wound care. Those who can lift haul dumpsters and loose fencing into a crude pile-up barricade. You and Olga push over some junior diplomat’s abandoned Volkswagen. You don’t know what to do about food.

Your armor is warm, but these slughead bootheels get no traction on frost. Your pockets rattle with chalky sticks of Combine-approved meth. You’re up to three times the approved ration now. You don’t want to have a heart attack, but you’re getting tired. Really tired. You slip and slog back to the camp, breath fogging, your arms full of twigs to dump on a fire.

You look into the red glow of the overpass, where dirty frost cedes to cold asphalt, and Todd lies bleeding to death from the lungs.

Wrenna’s still with you. She made it the whole way, despite the OSIPR fire and the laser cannons and the frag grenades. You thought about telling her to stay behind with her bad arm, but you both knew you couldn’t turn down the extra gun.

Now she kneels on the road, holding a compress to Todd’s bullet holes as people around her scavenge whatever they can. Her black hair, growing shaggily out from the cap, sticks to her face. Everywhere, distant fighting wails and pops as other rebels you’ve never met die and surge and fall back.

You drop your tinder into a burn barrel. Your hamstrings are killing you. You’re afraid to lie down, so you let Yusuf hand you a warm cup of melt-water, and you sit close enough to pat Todd on the knee. It’s all you can do. He whimpers and burbles in tandem as Wrenna returns, over and over, to sleeve hot blood off his mouth. The cold helps, but it’s coming faster now. You don’t figure he has real long.

“How’s that arm,” you ask. You’re so tired, your voice sounds like it’s leaking here from somewhere across the square.

“I don’t really feel it. I guess that’s a good thing.”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“You think Freeman’s still climbing?”

“Maybe. I want to give him another few hours, at least. If we can.”

“What happens if he’s not?”

“I don’t know. I suppose we all try to get to a train. But probably not,” you tell her. And you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t say any of this—you’re supposed to be the funny guy, and too much honesty is dangerous. You’re supposed to be undercover. But you can’t lie anymore. You tilt your head back on your neck and you bend your hurt knees, and you feel your rifle where it rests beside you. You breathe the winter air deep and you hold it in your stomach ‘til it burns. “We’re probably fucked.”

She doesn’t have the energy to sort-of smile.

“Well,” Wrenna croaks. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

You don’t know what to say anymore. So you don’t. You lay your head on the raw ground and you close your eyes for a second or a minute. You wish you’d saved Wrenna’s arm. You wish Todd had been standing a half-foot to the left, or that you were alive enough to feel sadder for him right now. You wish Kelsey hadn’t died. You wish Lyle hadn’t gone off-the-fucking-rails nuts. You wish you’d never trained Alyx at all—that you’d let her stay useless and giddy and stupid and afraid—and, more than anything, you wish somebody else had stopped it.

You know you couldn’t have. You just wish.

This is what you’re wishing when the lights go out.

_In December of 1903,_ the Gordon you dream about says in your head—whether he’s dead or alive—and he talked to you like maybe, in some way, you mattered, too. _Orville and Wilbur Wright looked over the earth and rewrote everything we thought we knew._

You open your eyes into darkness.

The sound is indescribable. Your brain cannot catch-up. The whole power grid shuts off at once, like the last pulse of somebody’s heart emptying itself of blood and life. It decapitates the field generators and the electric and a million points of artificial light. It dunks the entire city into an underwater silence that clangs like church bells in your ears. You can hear everything, suddenly—far-away strider whale hums and the crackling branches and even the soft rumple of snow. The background glow of the tower is gone—yanked, snuffed, struck out. At the top, something flashes like the last of a candle. Or like the strobe of a plane.

CS-C1s flicker and fall out of the sky. You swear for an instant you’ve died.

Everyone freezes. Nobody can believe it. Wrenna’s jaw hangs, and her red hands hover over Todd’s heaving belly, and the fire strikes flint against the whites of her eyes in a blackness so dark you didn’t know you remembered it.

You get up. You drift out from the overpass—past Yusuf and Olga where they sit, gaping—and you stumble out under the sky.

“Oh my God,” you say.

Space is still full of stars.

You snap out of your trance. You skitter back to the overpass, and you grab Todd by the straps of his shot-up armor, wrenching him up. You make Wrenna help you, even though she doesn’t want to—even though she snaps that he’ll die faster being moved—but _even though_ , she picks up his ankles. And, together, you carry him away from the firepit and out into the raw black night like he’s never seen it before.

“Look, Todd,” you rasp, slipping on the frost. He twitches and gurgles miserably during the journey, and you know it must feel like miles. By the time you all thump down on a bare patch of park grass, under the severed Victory Pillar, he’s gasping and spitting all over you. You don’t care. You plant yourself there, and Wrenna rests his boots gently enough, and then she fades into the dark to be with herself. You curl him halfway up to sit against you with your arm around his back.

“Look up,” you tell him. You prop his head on your shoulder and you point. Your own breath feels thin and precious, too. “You see that? I think that’s the Little Dipper.”

His eyes roll uncomprehendingly. Tears break down his face, and you’ve got no idea if he sees anything by now. You catch his head when it tips back and slap him awake and, just to be sure, tuck it under your chin so he won’t pass out.

“Todd. Come on, little brother. Come back a second. Look at that.”

Behind the shatter of starlight, you recognize the moon.

“Get a load of that, hey? You did that.” His rattles hitch, faster and then slower. The delicate frost melts under you, and you watch his glove tangle in the frozen grass, wrapping it mindlessly around his fingers. “Ain’t that the prettiest thing you ever saw?”

You can’t see his face. But you can feel the pull of his jaw as it smiles weakly. Blood spills onto his metal chest plate and rolls onto your lap. It’s enough.

“Yeah,” he wheezes.

You’ll look up, too, trying to find the constellations you remember as Todd dies there on your shoulder. Gordon gave you this back, you’ll think. And you got Gordon back. Maybe not forever—not the stars or the person—but for now. For a while. And if he can give you this back—if Gordon can return something so vast and unfathomable as the whole universe, something too big and too precious to even understand the importance of until it’s gone—then maybe you’ve lost less than you thought. Maybe you’ve all lost less of this world and yourselves than it feels like. Maybe you can get the other pieces of you back, too.

“Yeah,” you say.

Todd gulps his last lungful of air. You look up until you forget, for a moment, about trains.

* * *

_On May 16 th, 2003, in New Mexico’s Chihuahuan Desert, Dr. Gordon Freeman of the Black Mesa Research Facility changed the course of human history forever._

You won’t be here forever. Soon, you used to tell yourself, you’ll leave.

Soon you’ll retreat from the dead tower in the cover of darkness. You’ll walk right through the now-silent forcefield gates. You’ll find Alyx and Gordon. You’ll collect your live people and you’ll go catch a train.

Soon you’ll watch the sun rise and sink again on its own.

Soon you’ll think about your old dream-train as you grip a caboose gate in your MEUCA METROPOLITAN ENFORCEMENT UNIT COMBAT ARMOR glove and spit your last NC-FESC NON-COMBINE FIELD ENGAGEMENT STIMULANT CAPSULE into the gravel and pin your OSIPR OVERWATCH STANDARD ISSUE PULSE RIFLE under your armpit and wave and wave even though they’re growing smaller and smaller and smaller—the two people in the whole damned city you want on this real train more than anyone else. Alyx and Gordon will wave back at you for a while, but then their arms will drop, and they’ll just stand there against the winter dust like silhouettes, fading. They’ll wander off, maybe, as the Alpine Line ekes away, out of STATION PROSPEKT and around the rail curve and under a red December sky. They’ll be drawn back towards the black heart, to another train that might not exist quite as much as this one.

Soon you’ll be standing there, waving and waving and waving on the mad off-chance that seeing you there, looking back and waving with all you’ve got left, will pull your people out of this dream and along with you. Maybe it won’t. But you’ll be hoping it does.

Soon you’ll feel the rails clack under you as the line shutters away—toward woods this time, not sea. You won’t need to watch everyone—just for a second. You’ll open the caboose door, and you’ll step out of the ash smell and bitter air, and you’ll be by yourself inside.

Soon the six years of drugs will wear off. Soon you’ll be able to sleep.

Soon you’ll sit down in the dark train as a second real night falls around you, and the crumbling high-rises already wane into marshland and then into pines. Soon you’ll work your way up to the cars where people lay out old blankets and change their bandages and tally the remaining packets of preserved peas and pumpkin seeds, and you’ll make a little joke and everybody will laugh even though it’s not funny, because they’re desperate for someone who can still do things like that. Soon you’ll go pat Olga’s back as she shakes through the first wave of AFR come-down. Soon you’ll find a can of halved peaches and a place to lie flat and you won’t have any dreams.

Soon you’ll be at White Forest. Soon—screen by screen—you’ll start to forget what it was like when you lived in City Seventeen.

Soon you’ll forget the smell of your white mask.

Soon you’ll realize you’re not alone anymore. Wrenna will come looking for you. You won’t hear her footsteps on the tin floor—mostly because you’re so profoundly zoinked—but because there’s a moon now, you’ll see her shadow when she’s close. You’ll jump up like something’s wrong, but it’s not. She will hover there, holding her gun in her ruined arm, and say I just came to see if you’re OK. She’ll look worried, so you’ll try to think of something hokey, like always—to be two steps to this side of cute—but nothing comes to you. You’ll just stand there.

And soon you’ll wonder if maybe your train will never reach its final destination. Maybe you’ll make it into the wilderness and OVERWATCH will blow your ride off the tracks. Maybe they’ll send a hunter-chopper to chase you down and blast the roof off and riddle you all to giblets. Maybe you’ll scatter like stars in the spruces and freeze to death. Maybe there isn’t a White Forest anymore.

You’ll find out soon. But right now, you’re still on the way, and you’re both right here, and her eyes are dark and her legs are shaking, so you pull her pants down and pick her up and lean her against the train car carefully, and she wraps her arms around your neck and gives you a weird kiss on the nose and, well, you’re still human, after it all.

It doesn’t feel good, exactly. You’re too doped and panicked and strung out on the smell of death and taste of tin for anything to feel good—just relief, to prove it isn’t a dream and you’re actually rattling out of the city as fast as a RAZOR can go as the black tower smokes behind you. Wrenna’s minced arm bleeds under her bandages and it’s got to hurt like piss on a wire, sitting there on your shoulder, and you’ll feel bad and you’ll think of Todd gurgling back here under the overpass with brittle grass in his hand. You’ll think of Alyx when she was a little baby so small it seemed to you like she oughtn’t be out here in the world, so small you could curl her in one arm right against your heart and trick her into forgetting she’d been born. You think of Gordon walking to a test chamber with a smile behind the uncracked glass that hid his eyes.

Maybe it will be all right, you think.

Maybe the world will undo itself. Maybe some pocket god will freeze time and put everyone in chrysalis until you can recover something stolen from you—something like who you were and how you were before. Maybe it will be grand. Maybe you’ll get to White Forest with Wrenna and fall in love and get married, and you’ll have a house with a waterview and a whole kitchen, and you’ll drink lukewarm beer and dance badly out on the beach and burn toast and all the other things people did before everyone broke. And you know it’s all a shitty pipe dream and you know it’s the stimulants talking. You don’t want to marry Wrenna; you don’t hardly know her; and she doesn’t really want this to be with you; she wants her husband, Shannon Blum, who never made it to City Seventeen; and you’re still thinking about Gordon climbing into that Citadel and knocking out the whole night sky; and you’re tripping out of your mind on the fight-or-flight and the Combine meth; but you’re alive, ain’t you, and god damn it, you really are awake.

Soon the Citadel will fall.

Soon you and Wrenna will bury your faces in each other’s shoulders to escape the embarrassment, and before you can figure out what to do next, the Borealis will rip the quiet apart in the most brilliant and terrifying way you can’t imagine. Soon you’ll forget about embarrassment. You’ll forget you don’t know each other. You’ll grab one another tight as everything lights up in blue and burns the whole sky away.

Soon you’ll remember what you were like in the World Before.

But not right now. Right now, you can see color behind your eyelids, and you remember a black train hurtling through space through time.

* * *

_And we could hardly wait to get up in the morning._  
  
—WILBUR WRIGHT

You have a new dream now.

In City Seventeen, in Dr. Kleiner’s smashed-up laboratory bathroom, you hold your brother Gordon’s shoulders as he throws up centuries of mistakes and Innovation. You don’t hold him too long—you know he doesn’t like to be touched. But for a second, you swear, he comes up to rest his head on the lip of the toilet, and he leans into your body, and you squeeze him hard under the curve of your arm.

You pass him his glasses. You let him breathe. You leave, just for a second, and you come back like a fool, carrying Doctor K’s clunky hotplate in your arms.

You set it down on the sink. You switch on the power. You wait for the burner to glow hot. You don’t mind him eyeballing you like you’re crazy, because, well, you are.

You reach into your belt bag and show him what you brought.

 _I was saving this for my next promotion party. But what the hell_ , you joke, because that’s what you do. You waggle the tin cup in your fingers. You pull off the lid.

The smell of coffee overwhelms the tiny room, sharper than the bile and rich enough to make your stomach bubbly despite everything. There’s not much left inside. You stole it during a Resistance raid of a diplomatic tram years ago—and every time you think you can’t take one more day in this city, in this mask, you boil some tap water and mix in a scoop.

Your mask is ash now. So you rattle what’s left, shaking earthy grounds toward the center, and then you scrape them loose with a tablespoon, and you start warming the cup of water.

There’s nothing to fancy it up. You cook the grounds until they simmer and settle, take one last sip, and pass the rest to Gordon. It’s old coffee. But it’s still black enough to bring you—just for a moment—back to yourself.

Gordon looks into the cup for a beat too long. Then he drinks too fast, scalds his tongue, and steams his glasses up. But he keeps going. He tilts his head back and gulps so hard, you know he burns his throat up, too. You think about reeling his arm down, but you don’t. You know how it feels to need to wake up so badly you don’t care what happens to you anymore.

You tell him maybe that’s enough coffee. Maybe he doesn’t need to wake up yet. Maybe he should go lie down and rest.

You try not to chuckle as he sticks a finger along his nose to wipe each lens clean. You try not to worry about his stitched-up eyebrow for feel too awful for hurting him so much. You try not to think of any big red serial numbers or do any grim math. You try not to forget this moment—because it’s not a dream; it’s your memory, isn’t it—and you swear to God that when Gordon looks at you, he does so right through two decades of time.

I don’t want to sleep anymore, he says.

He finishes the coffee. He sets the cup quietly on the sink.

Neither do you.

But you wouldn’t mind counting the stars.

**Author's Note:**

> Now play [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cAKEMq2IlM) and roll credits and pretend _Half-Life: Barney_ is really going to happen with me. :)
> 
> AUTHOR’S NOTE: I… got more attached to Wrenna than I intended to, but I sincerely promise there won’t one day be a drabbles collection of her life pre- and post-City Seventeen. I absolutely did not intricately daydream a montage of flashbacks and flashforwards. It surely does not have a working title, and if it did, that title would not be _After Ending_. [sweats in 35k]


End file.
